Netgear ReadyNAS 104 4-Bay NAS - 4x Bays, Diskless, Marvell Armada 370 1.2GHz, USB 3.0, Gigabit LAN

Comment:
I wish I didn't give a bad rating to this box as it seems to work pretty well but I have been having too much problems to give it a higher rating.First: WARRANTY. 3 years? Yeah right. 3 years for HARDWARE ONLY. The SOFTWARE warranty is for 3 TINY MONTHS!!! Seriously, I just cannot believe that. I have purchased that box 8 months ago, wrote to the tech support because the NAS reported one faulty drive and when I shut it down, removed the drive and powered it back up, no error, RAID is normal.So I did a DISK TEST, believe it or not, I stopped it after 11 DAYS. I was sick and tired to hear the noise of the drives. It never finished. I mean, 11 days for 3 X 3TB drives?So the technical support team told me that my warranty expired (3 months after my purchase) and I'd need to pay 80 US$ to extend my warranty. Very disappointed by that.

Comment:
The advantage of four bay over two bay is with raid 5 you lose 25% capacity as protection in case 1 drive fails, instead of raid 1 you lose 50% which is too much in my opinion.it's not the fastest speed and feature rich unit on the market, but for the price paid, I think it's good deal.

Comment:
Not stable enought to put sensitive data. Unable to have it work correctly, latest firmware 6.1.5 buggy and was told by netgear support to downgrade to 6.0.8 . After that i needed to reset because of constant freeze and lost all my data. Plus RAID5 array of 4 3TB WD red take about 26 hours to build (did that 3 times in one week). Had speed problems with my exiting gigabit router(engenius). Want something user friendly and easy to use at home. Read Netgear forum before purchasing, you will have a good idea of the product.

Comment:
This is the second NAS that I have purchased and so far I've been pleased with this one. Drives installed without any tools in a nice locking system. The 4 four drives I installed had some old info on them, so the initial set-up process was a bit more complicated, as I had to reset to factory defaults (Not well documented process of using a paper-clip, restarting and cycling through the onscreen menu to find Factory Reset). After that, setup was a breeze. All functions are controlled by web interface which is clean and intuitive. Runs very quiet and not warm to the touch. (my 2-bay D-Link can get hot enough to cook on). I would suggest checking the Netgear web site for drive compatibility before buying drives, as it's a pretty small list.