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I had previously tried using a wireless dongle but the signal was not very good and playing online TV it would keep having to “buffer” the connection – not ideal when you are trying to watch some sport like football!

Simple to set-up. You plug one homeplug into a wall socket near your router and connect a network cable to/from the router and then you put the other homeplug into a wall socket near the computer and run a network cable to/from it.

In my case I did this and switched everything on and the computer spotted the internet connection straight away and worked like a dream – tried watching online TV and no more problems so very happy.

The instructions recommend that the homeplug is plugged directly into its own wall socket and not through an adapter however I have found using an adapter makes no difference – although I assume it depends on the age of the wiring in your house.

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I also dig that in theory this is a fab product, it can do all sorts of stuff for you.

But if you are like me, that “setting static IP” and “submasks” do not figure in your regular vocabulary, you should think twice whether this is the right storage solution for you. And this is where I have a major squabble, this item should not be sold to average Jill and Joe without adequate user manual and adequate support, which at the moment it is. The manual is very short, could be written in Chinese as far as I am concerned, would make the same difference to my user experience. And if your browser say does not authenticate the networks web address, or you do not know how to get into the DOS and set up a static IP, then either leave this alone or do like me = I threw £60 after this and hired a local IT guy who set the system up for me. (It took him 1.5 hours.) And this, I feel might only be the beginning. If you check out Netgear’s own forum on this, these machines are so complex that they have all sorts of problems that even people who have more advanced knowledge in IT can not solve by themselves.

So, while I am elated with what the potential capabilities of this monster are – can check and update you data from any computer anywhere in the world via the HTTP protocol, economic energy usage, networking in my home wirelessly and protecting data on all our computers, share memory between users, automated backup, “easy peasy” upgrades etc. – I dread the moment when something fails, so I am keeping this IT guys number close to my computer, just in case…

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Yes it is more on the costly scale of the market, but it’s worth every penny. It’s the only NAS I have had up and running in 5 minutes. Great utilities, easy to manage, even those less technical will have no problems getting it up and running. Also really impressed with the expandability of the device, it now supports 1.5 Tb drives giving over 4Tb storage, so when you have more money available you can upgrade to give you the extra storage you need.

Reading on the web people have commented on the noise it produces. Apart from boot times (approx 2-3 minutes) the box is silent, as a frame of reference my Sky+ is noisier.

Well recommended and it’s worth stretching your budget to get.

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Im a bit of a DVD/CD Gannet on Amazon, spend a large % of my income @amazon on movies and albums so a while back i built a Windows Media Center with Vista Ultimate for the lounge. Spent several months converting the lot to DivX/MP3 and I also added a Linksys DMA2200 Extender recently and a Linksys WRT600N Gigabit Lan/Wireless N Router (import from us cos not being released in UK according to Linksys).

Anyway, despite having 2tb of disk space in the media center, i bought this to give access to other pc’s on my home network with low power consumption. Did a bit of research and stacked up the specs against each other and this came out top overall.

took the plunge, but bought the barebones version which was actually a ReadyNAS NV+ RND4250 but had disks removed. I opted to fill it with 4 x Samsung 1tb disks as its not worth shelling out the extra cash for the WD or Seagate jobbies as theres no performance advantage in a NAS (gb lan or wifi lan is bottleneck not seek times) and saved myself a few quid in the process.

Have to say its absolutely rockin. In X-Raid i get 2.7tb with full redundancy from 4×1tb disks. If any one of the disks goes down, just pop it out and replace and the X-Raid rebuilds the array with the replacement disk and with no data lost.

Built in Functionality is second to none, its got a dev site where u can add bittorrent and some other apps developed by community, well done Netgear for absorbing infrant into their product portfolio.. its the best product they have in their lineup! (im away from netgear wifi products and over to linksys cos of poor wifi performance and bugs).

Admin and setup is simple if ur experienced IT pro, then u will really like it, if ur not, it wipes it 4 u. Windows/unix/linux/mac clients are all catered for and all thru a web browser be it Firefox, Safari or the other one that most people use :S

Ive had no freezes, no crashes, no performance problems and no issues whatsoever, its been runnin with latest raidiator firmware for bout 2 months with no issues, just lovely.

It is accessed by a UNC share \servernamesharename and can even be setup as a WINS Server

Its got too many features to mention, but one great feature i like is the schedule that you can set for uptime/downtime so that its only on when u want it on. Good green credentials and its on when im around 2 use it with low consumption.

In terms of robustness, its built like a small Tiger Tank, very heavy, solid construction, with status panel and cool lights n no flimsy stuff u normally get with netgear home products like their routers.. it was built by somebody else before they got bought by Netgear so no issues in this dept

Before u buy just look around and get ur own disks all of the same type.

Its a great product that has so much functionality and possibilities for further functionality expansion thru a community… best of breed IMHO

About 2 buy my 2nd unit, i luv it

Enjoy

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Good points: solid, well-built, expandable, good user community, 5yr warranty

Not so good: price, but then it’s not cheap Chinese tat