Others say...

"Nothing fancy ReadyNAS Rocks!"
We have the 500GB model and are using it as the home file and music server with Mac OS X. We have it connected to our Sonos Digital Music system as well. It's simple and it totally rocks. Music plays out via our wifi network with no fuss, we can easily run downloads and stream out the library directly to iTunes on our laptops as well. It's pretty easy to setup.

I had a bit of trouble getting FTP access but nothing too hard if you know a tiny bit about ftp networking. It's quiet, small and is low power consumption. It even emails me when it has a problem, though that's rare. Mostly when the power in the house goes out and it has to restart itself. It was down to this and the Drobo but that was way more expensive and requires you to buy your own drives and add the NAS option. The ReadyNAS is all ready to go right out of the box. We couldn't be happier.

"Professional feature-set in a consumer-friendly unit"
Most appliance-style consumer devices are dumbed-down, inflexible units aimed at consumers who don't need power-user features, while the pro gear is expensive and far too complex for most people to set up. That frustrates home power-users who are stuck in the middle of the two markets.

As an IT professional and advanced hobbyist, these shortcomings irk me with most gear like this unit. In reading the specs for the Netgear, my concern was that it tried to do too much, but it turns out it does everything well (that I've tried so far). Netgear has tried to go beyond basic NAS and make this little box be the center of your network, including support for photo sharing, bit-torrent, chaining on additional devices, etc, and they seem to have succeeded.

I won't rehash the feature list, but pros:

* Very solidly constructed, with variable speed cooling.

* Empty second drive bay allows cheap expansion.

* Drive-sled design is shared with larger ReadyNAS units for easy uprades.

* Many protocols supported (NFS, APF, etc), nice that it's not just the usual SMB/CIFS.

* SNMP and SMART support, and email alerts, add some enterprise-style monitoring capabilty.

* Easy to check for firmware updates (from admin interface)

* Power management makes it use even less power (and it's quieter when drive is spun-down).

* Unit allows for chaining of additional USB devices (I tested it with a keychain-style flash-drive).

* More features than most people will use.

* RAIDar software provides easy access but is not required for normal use (only to "find" the unit for lay-people). All actual admin is through web-GUI.

* I tested CIFS, NFSv3/udp, and NFSv3/tcp throughput. My test-bed was a FreeBSD server running a packet filter, so your results may be higher without the filter or from Windows, or with tuning for jumbo packets (supported) or higher MTU.

* In my tests, baseline throughput for comparison from local disk to disk, was 44MB/sec for the test dataset. Over the network (through a dumb gig-e switch) to the NAS, for NFS3/udp (w/buffering) it was 6.77MB/sec , 9.44MB/sec for NFS3/tcp , and 10.1MB/sec for SMBFS (CIFS).

* Basic security levels are ok, requiring the default password be changed on first login and FTP is disabled by default.

* RPC services running on the Netgear by default are rpcbind, rquotad, status, nfs, nlockmgr, mountd .

Quibbles (too small to be Cons):

* Unit is loud on power-up (louder than my PCs). Idle noise level is a little high also.

* Boot time is sluggish. Firmware upgrade (I did one) takes several reboot cycles and a seemingly inordinate length of time, more than 20 minutes?

* Netgear site claims the unit has SSH support, but unit does not answer on TCP/22, and I didn't seen an option to enable SSH.

* Web admin interface is a little clunky, could use "save" buttons at the top of each screen. Advanced options are a little obtuse and could use links to additional documentation or wikipedia entries or something.

Conclusion: this Netgear strikes a nice compromise between power and ease of use, with advanced features and a lot of configurability, while arriving set up for immediate use on your home network.

It may not be for your technophobe elderly aunt, but presumably such a person wouldn't have a home network in the first place. Highly recommended.

"ReadNAS Duo First Impressions"
I don't write many reviews. I must really like something, or hate something, before I take the time to write a review. In this case I very much like the ReadyNAS Duo. I just purchased the Netgear RND2150 and have been experimenting with setup and configuration. I have software engineering and storage experience so I found this very easy to use. For the novice and experienced alike, the [...] web site should be very useful. There are how-tos and you can download useful add-ons from the site.
This is one solid and compact little device.
The latest RAIDiator 4.1.4 firmware supports both RAID 0 and RAID 1. Read the release notes.
RAID 0 (500GB + 500GB = 1TB no disk drive failure support) or RAID 1 (500GB + 500GB = 500GB Redundent data allows for 1 disk failure).
This a serious linux based server. Don't expect to stick a windows drive with data into an internal slot and expect to see the data. The internal drives are formatted for the appropriate RAID configuration. You can connect a windows NTFS or FAT drive as an external USB drive and it will share the existing data (but USB external NTFS was slow in my testing - more later).
ReadyNAS Duo uses journaling by default. Journaling is a method of logging a disk operation before execution, so if there is a power failure for example, the system can determine if the operation completed and provides much improved reliability over an non-journaling systems.
Couple of comments.
If you want to switch to RAID 0 you must first delete the RAID 1 volume which is created by default. This deletes all data so back up first.
To add security to shares you must first create users in the user admin area. Then you can add these users to to restricted shares to limit access.
Remember to enable "allow guest access" for windows if you want open access to the shares.
USB external drives:
If you add a windows NTFS USB drive you can use it but it is much slower than if you format it with EXT3 in the USB Storage panel. The system assigns a share name to each external drive. You can change the name of the USB share. However if you remove the USB drive and add another you cannot reuse the same share name unless you use the Add-on utility "Clean_USB_Storage.bin". You can download this from the [...] site. To reset your USB share names, disconnect all usb shares, disconnect or power off the USB disks, load this utility, and all USB share names are reset.
All all-in-all on first impressions this is a great box. The ReadyNAS Duo will allow me to have redundant RAID1 shares and also non-redundant shares using external USB drives, all without tying up a server and the associated server maintenance (especially windows). I am very happy with this product based on my initial experience.

"1-star review by Kalyan S. Tirumala should be ignored because..."
It is a shame that the reviewer Kalyan S. Tirumala (below) lost all his/her hard drive data, but please understand that what Kalyan S. Tirumala did was wrong. You are not supposed to take a hard drive that you own AND has your important data on it, and install it into the NAS. Do not do that! If you do this, the NAS will automatically reformat the drive you installed (reformats drive to ext3 file system) which then deletes all data that was on it. Then, Kalyan S. Tirumala goes on to complain about tech support.... OMG. Sorry, but I had to LOL.

"Netgear ReadyNAS Duo"
I use the unit to backup the various coumpters on my home network. It was easy to set up and runs very quitely. No problems so far and the speed is well within what should be expected from this type device.