NetGear appear to have provided or more accurately not provided enough information about the EDA 500 expansion chassis. The situation is so bad that one is getting the impression the product may have even been already discontinued. (Another thread says a couple of resellers including NewEgg list it as discontinued.)
What is clear is that it is intended as an expansion chassis for the 300 and 500 series. What is not clear is how this works, there is contradictory information in these forums.
1. If you have an existing ReadyNAS 516 (as an example) and plugin an EDA 500, will this add additional capacity to your existing volume without having to do a complete reformat of the ReadyNAS? 2. Will it only work as an additional separate volume? 3. Apparently with OS 6 the limitations on growing a volume over a certain size no longer apply so you could in theory move from 6 x 2TB to 6 x 4TB without having to reformat, is this correct? If so this might logically make it possible to grow an existing XRAID on just a ReadyNAS to include the extra storage of the EDA 500. 4. How many EDA 500 units can you connect? Some pages suggest just one, e.g. http://www.netgear.com/business/product ... 51600.aspx but the table here http://www.netgear.com/landing/storage/ ... .html#tabs suggests that you could connect three EDA 500 units to a ReadyNAS 516 via the three eSATA ports.
The perceived purpose of the EDA 500 is to add additional storage to a ReadyNAS when you fill it up, if you can plug it in and your storage just grows then it achieves this goal. If however you have to reformat to take advantage then it fails in this goal. You might as well buy a bigger box.
I have struggled to find resellers for the EDA 500, but it looks very roughly that you could get a ReadyNAS 3200 for a similar price to a ReadyNAS 516 plus two EDA 500 boxes. If so this might explain why the EDA 500 appears so much a flop along with the fact it also appears the you cannot simply plug one in and expand your volume.
On a different topic, I wish NetGear would provide a storage calculator so you can enter the drive sizes and quantities and RAID levels (i.e. 1 or 2 drive protection) and see what useable space you end up with including with/without an EDA 500.
