Netgear Readynas Duo
Probably my favorite addition to my home setup, is my Netgear ReadyNAS Duo. Not only are the two drive bay’s hot swappable, and working in RAID 5, with a Journaled file system,but they have also made it VERY Feature rich!
- My Networking Corner
(It’s the big black box in the back)
Features such as:
- CIFS/SMB for Windows®
- AFP 3.1 for Mac OS 9/X
- NFS v2 / v3 for Linux and UNIX
- HTTP/S for web browsers
- FTP/S support
- RSYNC (also a linux favorite!)
and it’s setup for media streaming as well:
- DLNA Compatible UPnP AV
- Logitech SqueezeboxTM
- Sonos Digital Music Center
- Network DVD player compatible
- Windows MCE compatible
- Sony Playstation 3
- Microsoft Xbox 360
But let’s also not forget, a Bit Torrent client built right in!
So why is that nice? Well do you have roomates?
Ever wonder where all the bandwith is going in your house as your trying to play some COD4 and instead getting lagged out of almost every match? (is it just me?) for me it seems that it’s my roomates constantly downloading and sharing files with there friends. So I’ve got them a nice little bookmark that sends them to the web interface and I can go ahead and limit the upload and download speeds globally instead of relying on the QoS of the opensource Netgear Router that I’m using.
This has helped out GREATLY!
Here’s a screenshot of the web interface:
Bit Torrent Web Interface
It’s pretty clean, and very user friendly (which is great when you have roomates like I do….)
The other nice thing is it uses a share you define on the network drive and you all can access the downloaded content then via the network, saving you all time and hard drive space. No more “Oh yea I just downloaded that the other day, you should have asked” or “Hey I keep getting disconnected from the network, did you just start another download?” Now it’s all nicely there and spread out.
Of course you can also plug in other devices into the extra USB ports, say another external drive, (like that 1TB Western Digital “My Book” drive in the picture below.) or say a printer that you can all use now via the network. Really it’s more then just a storage device, it’s a home network conglomerate allowing you to do so much more then just backup your data. But it’s really good at that too!
I would say I generate a mean speed uploading to my private share at about 23-30 MB/s which is good, not quite what your used to if your running your own samba server over a GigE network, but still, for the price (about $400.00) VERY worth it! Plus it does so much more then a standard linux box setup for a samba server and with alot less configureing.
The web interface for setting up the box, and shared is a little outdated, and uses java which I could live without but at least it’s not flash. which means that it runs on my OLD laptop (running Damn Small Linux because it’s that old) and connecting to it as a mapped network drive is also very easy and work great.
I give it a **** out of ***** due to the outdated web interface,
So this is my review of the Netgear ReadyNAS Duo, if you have any questions on setup / use, feel free to chat me up in our XMPP (jabber) server! (view the contact me page for more info)
Tags: Netgear, networking, ReadyNAS
