.I bought the 500GB version because it was the cheapest of the Duos. The only difference is in how much storage is included. It was a lot cheaper to go out and buy a couple of 1 TB drives than to buy the more expensive Netgear RND2110 ReadyNAS Duo 1 TB Desktop Network Attached Storage
.That was 4 months ago and I'm just absolutely thrilled with my purchase. I didn't purchase or try any other NAS devices so I can't do a comparative review. What I can do though is describe my experiences.
Reliability
I purchase a NAS for one main reason: reliable primary storage. I have all of my media and data sitting on the NAS. I have it running in RAID 1 mode and I'm using an external USB drive to backup the NAS itself. My current system status shows an uptime of 30+ days and the only reason it isn't longer is because I've rebooted it a few times to perform upgrades. It communicates directly with my APC UPS.
Flexibility
This is an extremely flexible little linux box. It supports UPnp AV streaming, SqueezeCenter (for those of you with Squeezeboxes) and Firefly (which is what I'm using to stream to my Roku Soundbridges). It also supports a whole range of protocols for file sharing: CIFS, NFS, AFP, FTP, HTTP, HTTPS, and RSYNC. Of course it supports gigabit ethernet and jumbo frames.
You can easily configure security to meet your needs and if you attach a USB printer it can also serve as a Printer Queue.
Performance
I have had absolutely no performance issues when streaming music or video but I have had some slowdowns while performing backups or very disk intensive operations. For this reason I don't think the ReadyNas is good as a primary repository for working video or code.
Expandability
With two drives in there that's the limit for expansion and it also means that only RAID 0 or RAID 1 (using Netgear's X-RAID) are supported. So my plan is to throw in some 1.5TB drives when I run out of space.
Some of the popular add-ons include a BitTorrent Service and Debian Package management utility and Root Access. Once you've enabled Root SSH you can install a whole bunch of other things. One of the most popular ones seems to be Subversion.
In my opinion, adding additional software and services just increases the chance of a failure of some kind. I want a nice, simple, reliable, and secure place to store all of my data and to use it (i.e. stream the video, audio, photos) without duplicating it on a PC.
So in a nutshell, I'm thrilled with my Duo. I get access to the same data from all of the computers, media extenders, etc that are on my network and I feel more secure knowing that the disks are in RAID 1 configuration.
Many folks have their financial records, music libraries, video libraries and personal memories sitting on their computers. A catastrophic failure might mean that these will be lost forever. If you're like me then you've already found that DVDs and CDs just don't have the storage capacity needed for backing up 500+ GB of stuff. A NAS, combined with local and off-site backups is a perfect solution for the modern, wired home.
