Successful User Experience after 1 month of ownership
Forum categories are a little weak IMHO. I would think "User Experience" would be its own forum. "Feedback" looks a little bitchy.
Anyhow, I've owned my ReadyNAS NV+ for about a month and thought it would be helpful to share my experience.
Bought a bare unit from Fry's in Houston for about $250. Purchase 5 x 2TB "green" Samsung HD204UI's (1 spare) BEFORE I knew anything about potential compatibility issues. Fortunately, mine were manufactured in April and have shown NO problems and I've run the unit both very hard and soft. These drives are fine.
Netgear needs to be more responsive towards certifying drives.
Haven't looked at upgrading RAM as I'm using the box as a media player and a backup device so cache will flush continuously.
Regarding RAID, I don't believe the device does RAID 5. My contention is anything past RAID 1 is really RAID 4 -- block level striping with a dedicated parity disk.
I draw this conclusion from 2 attempts to make the box RAID 5 (must reset the box with a paper clip to pick this -- Google it) vs. my final pass at giving up and going with X-RAID. Point being you cant format 3 out of the 4 drives quickly and then go into "rebuild" mode on disk 4 if you have distributed parity. NOT that I'm at all against RAID 4 but it's a truth in advertising issue. So I'm now X-RAID (extensible RAID 4) with 4 x 2 TB drives (yielding 5.5 "real" TB).
My whole house is a 1 GbE network w/ Jumbo Frames so response to offload Ghost images and media ISOs (trying to put all my DVDs on the ReadyNAS) is reasonable. RAID 4 does limit write speed but everything performs as expected.
Only exception is the sorry web interface that runs slowly on the best of days and times out if you're pounding the unit with file I/O. This is my biggest / only gripe with the unit.
BitTorrent works well though I won't use it without a PeerGuardian capability.
Re: Successful User Experience after 1 month of ownership
The HD204UI is now on the compatibility list. So long as your NAS came with 4.1.7 or you last did a factory default on this firmware things should work fine with this disk.
Yes, I think, X-RAID is like RAID-4. Both RAID-4 and RAID-5 protect against a single disk failure. You can use Flex-RAID to do RAID-5 if you wish, but it does require a factory reset to switch. See Configuring Your ReadyNAS for Flex-RAID. It's unlikely that drives larger than 2TB will ever be supported so for an advanced user there's not really much benefit of using X-RAID over RAID-5 if you already have 2TB disks.
The newer X-RAID2 which is found on the x86 devices (e.g. NVX, Ultra, Pro) is like RAID-5 with 3 or more disks (in fact if you use X-RAID2 dual-redundancy [available on 6-bay or greater devices] it's like RAID-6). X-RAID2 has the added advantage of being a dual-layer array (e.g. with 2x1TB and 2x2TB disks you could have a dual-layer array with a RAID-5 4x1TB volume and a 2x1TB RAID-1 volume).
The web-interface is designed for configuring the unit and not for regular use. It's a low priority process so if you are heavily using the unit it's expected you may have problems accessing the web-interface.
Re: Successful User Experience after 1 month of ownership
X-RAID on Sparc ReadyNAS (e.g. Duo, NV+) uses a dedicated parity disk that doesn't have a partition table. You can tell this by downloading the logs (Status > Logs > Download all logs), extracting the zip contents and looking at partition.log.
X-RAID2 on x86 ReadyNAS (e.g. NVX, Ultra, Pro) has parity distributed across all disks and has no dedicated parity disk. Again you can see this by looking at partition.log.
Re: Successful User Experience after 1 month of ownership
How were you able to get ghost to drop the images properly on your nasbox?
Some reason even though I have 6TB of space, I get out of space message when dropping to the designated share. MY account does not have a quota so I'm not sure whats going on.
Re: Successful User Experience after 1 month of ownership
I am not familiar with "Ghost" unless you are talking about Nortons Ghost which I used until the SATA drives came out and they were slow responding to handling the SATA controller and USB drives. I used to to clone one drive to another. (Still clone my system drives. No important data on the PC's. All important/critical data on ReadyNAS units which makes it accessible to all PC's.)
I use my ReadyNAS as a server not a backup unit. I actually have a 4 1/2 year old NV+ (Infrant - pre Netgear) in a backup role by using rsync to synchronize the files on the NVX to the NV+. If I were going to back up my PC's to the ReadyNAS I would either use the Mimeo that came on my NVX setup disc, or Acronis. (I went to Acronis True Image to replace Nortons Ghost back in 2006).
