encryption

I, too, would be interested in hearing NetGear's response to this question...

To me, the Qnap implementation is a step in the right direction, but you have to balance encryption with performance... and if we look at some testing that was done over at Tom's Hardware, we can see that encrypting with the Qnap device (or any available at that time) creates a significant hit on performance:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/nas-encryption-aes-ni,2873.html

Now, if Qnap (or some other manufacturer [NetGear!]) were to go to an Intel chip that supports AES-NI, I suspect that would change the equation drastically (in my experience using encryption on a AES-NI processor is significantly faster that one that doesn't support it, and that was echoed in the article above).

In the meantime, the price difference between the Qnap and the ReadyNAS makes the ReadyNAS the choice for me (for now). I suppose once mine arrives I'll be throwing a TrueCrypt file container on it and moving the encryption/decryption to the client where AES-NI will be available. Hopefully this approach will lead better performance numbers than those in the Tom's Hardware article, but it'll be interesting to test that and find out... unless someone else has already tried this and would be willing to share their results?

The only downside I can see with this approach is that only that only one client would be able to have read/write access to that file container; any other clients will have to be read only (or at least, I assume that would work... if someone else has tried this already, please chime in).

All that having been said, and getting back to the original question, it would be interesting to hear what NetGear has in mind for encryption on the ReadyNAS product...

Thanks,

- Nathan