recommendation for home + home office, confused by options

My ReadyNAS is up and running! Thanks everyone (especially spinaltap) for all of the good advice. It's presently setting itself up; I chose to use X-RAID2 because I put in only two drives, and I plan to add more later, which is why I got a 4-bay device, vs. a 2-bay device.

The real challenge was updating the firmware of the two Seagate 3TB drives I've installed. Turns out that Seagate's firmware update image boots on intel Macs! (first time I've booted my machine into a non-OSX environment). For any ReadyNAS newbies (like myself) who bought Seagate 3TB drives that need their firmware updated and who might find these posts in a search, I'll re-post a links that spinaltap gave me that guided me through the process.

1) link to Netgear's appoved drives list http://kb.netgear.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/20641
My Seagates were on here, but needed a firmware update. The ones I bought were: Seagate 3TB Barracuda SATA 6GB/s 64MB 7200RPM 3.5" Hard Drive Mfr#: ST3000DM001. I bought them from DABS.co.uk (where my ReadyNAS NV+ v2 was on sale, best price I could find anywhere in the UK).
2) To update the firmware, I needed Seagate's firmware ISO. I went to this page http://knowledge.seagate.com/articles/en_US/FAQ/223651en, and downloaded the bootable CD image for non-Windows Intel-based systems http://www.seagate.com/staticfiles/support/downloads/firmware/Barracuda-ALL-GRCC4H.iso
3) In order to update the firmware on my Mac, I followed these instructions http://support.seagate.com/firmware/firmware_update_procedure_mac.html which booted my machine in to a DOS environment.
4) I followed the instructions on this page http://support.seagate.com/firmware/firmware_update_procedure.html

I am using an old-ish Mac Pro, which is Intel-based. I initially connected one of the Seagate drives using a SATA dock (via USB), but I'm guessing that the very basic DOS that Seagate provided doesn't have a usb driver. So, I opened up my machine, pulled out all 4 drive sleds (and turned off all of my external hard drives), and installed the seagate drives (one at at a time) in a drive sled. Then I booted into the DOS environment (hold down "option" at startup, choose the CD on which I installed the Seagate ISO image with DOS and the firmware updater) and updated the drives. Between updates, the software told me to shut off the power to my machine, which I did.

So, I have two drives with updated firmware in my ReadyNAS, and it's just finished doing whatever it does to get them ready. Time to figure out how to actually use this thing!

Thanks again, I'm sure I'll be back for insights in to how to use my ReadyNAS to its best advantage.

Cheers!

Chas