Netgear Introduces Linux-Based NAS Devices

drewmoney writes "A LinuxDevices.com article introduces several of Netgear's Linux-based NAS devices, technology they acquired with the purchase of Infrant earlier this year. (Here is Netgear's product page.) There are models from 1.5 TB, at about $1,100, to 4 TB, topped by a 4-TB rack-mount version. They are geared towards the professional home user and small and medium businesses. The NAS devices come complete with the usual RAID features, file-system access, and a built in USB print server. All are controlled through a Web GUI and some even offer SSH access."

Comments

RTFA, asshat.

[jay-be-em]

"Supporting NFS, rsync, SMB, ftp, and http file access, the ReadyNAS devices have a featureful Web GUI and, apparently new in the Netgear models, SSH access (although SSH may, as in the past, be limited to use as an rsync tunnel)."

A Slashvertisement by any other name

[giminy]

There have been dozens Linux-based NASs for years now. Infrant sells bare-bones ones, Buffalo Technology sells them, heck, D-Link sells a (crappy) little NAS with a linux kernel. How is this news? Or was this ad sponsored? :).

Reid

Re:A Slashvertisement by any other name

[giminy]

I own a DNS-323 too. I loaded it up with two 500gb hard disks. It sucks. I still use it, but it sucks. The standard firmware only lets you update the device with D-Link digitally signed firmware. The D-Link firmware is buggy as hell, still, even after the thing has been out commercially for over a year.

- It has a bad version of Samba on it that will cause your files to magically disappear if you decide to copy files larger than about 20 gigs, or if you copy large numbers of files at the same time.
- It uses the ext2 filesystem, which not only lacks journalling, but has no nice way to fun fsck (only option is to enable telnet via a fun_plug and run fsck on your mounted filesystem...blech!).
- It *still* has piss-poor unicode support.
- The current firmware does funny things if one of your drives dies and you have a RAID-1 array, such as not rebuilding the array. Some users have reported that it won't even detect a drive failure in raid-1.
- Its user/group and volume management simply doesn't work. You can't set up multiple shares and give different users different permissions to the shares. User/group management is a mess.

All of these problems exist in the 1.03 firmware, which is the latest version. My unit has also been blessed with a common hardware problem -- one of the "drive okay" blue led's died. Quite a few folks are reporting this (probably cheap leds).

About the only way to make the 323 usable and safe is to solder a serial port on it so that you can use redboot and overwrite the stock firmware. IMHO, if you're going to take the trouble to solder and manage the thing via the command-line, you may as well just plunk down a bit of extra cash and have an actual warranty. Or save the money and put two hard drives in an old computer/install linux distro of your choice. It certainly shouldn't be considered a reliable nas, and I certainly wouldn't be saving copies of anything important on it (unless you're backing the data up somewhere else).

Re:If a buy it, I legally can ask for the source c

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, they already have GPL code available for the older 3.0 release. 4.0 was just released this week, a GPL package should be available for it shortly.

Re:If a buy it, I legally can ask for the source c

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep... here's the code....

ftp://downloads.netgear.com/files/GPL/readynas_gpl.zip

1.5 TB for $1100 !

[this great guy]

That's $0.73/GB for this Netgear product. Almost a year ago I built a 2.5 TB OpenSolaris fileserver using ZFS for $950, that's twice cheaper: $0.38/GB.

I understand Netgear market this product for endusers without the time or the ability to build and configure a NAS themselves, but this reminds me that some of us are privileged people, because we don't have to be victims of such horribly expensive proprietary gear... We have the choice to build it ourselves and save real, big bucks.

This also shows that the storage market really have room for more competitors. At a time where the raw cost of disks is $0.20/GB and where you can build storage servers for $0.36/GB (proof: I did it), the only explanation behind the high prices in the storage market is pure lack of competition. This is one of the reasons why Google build their servers themselves: they figured out all the "professional products" out there are overpriced.

Re:Infrant's ReadyNAS?

[eagl]

Yes. These are re-badged Infrant ReadyNAS units. My NV+ works like a champ. You definately want to read the FAQs if you get one however... Depending on the firmware revision, they do not work well with certain hard drives and for a certain range of serial numbers, they recommend pulling out and reversing the fan to help with cooling.

Also, these do not provide terribly fast speeds no matter what kind of drives you use, so for drive selection you're better off going for the drives with the lowest heat and noise profile, vs. the absolute fastest drive on the market. I put 4 500 gig samsungs in mine and it runs quiet and cool, while performing within a percent or so of how everyone else's is running.

A popular mod for these is to drop in a higher capacity ram sodimm. I happened to have one lying around from a previous laptop upgrade, so it was a no-brainer for me. The extra ram supposedly can boost speeds by up to 15%, but I have not measured it either way. I just put in the bigger sodimm, ran the internal memory checker a couple of times, and haven't worried about it since.

Re:OpenVPN

[mcpkaaos]

You could always throw a cheap router in front of your NAS and install DD-WRT, which has offered OpenVPN support for quite some time.

So sad...

[TexNex]

Before Netgear bought them Infrant was the best NAS out there. Great price for what you got and some excelent support & firmware updates that truly enhanced the product. I was hoping Netgear would change their direction and move towards the Infrant product ideals but, it seems NG is no better than Microsoft in this regard and has chosen to buy & cursh the competition.

This is the old Infrant NAS

[Anonymous Coward]

1)
This is the old Infrant NV+
It has been out for about 2 years in its current form.
This is absolutely nothing new.
Infrant just got bought by NetGear and hence the PR push.
New brand, same old, same old device.

2)
The minor tweak is the new 4.0 firmware, whose main plus is breaking the old 3TB limit.
Other than that, same hardware.

3)
When NetGear bought Infrant they raised the price of the drives from $600 (diskless) to $800 (diskless
And made it tougher to get diskless systems.
You'll want to add your own drives as you'll notice their mark-up on the drives is high.
Adding drives is a main selling point of the NV+ with its RAID-X system

4)
Other than a PR paper launch of an old product, the NV+ is pretty nice.
It does a lot of things easily, without a lot of effort.
RAID-X is cool, and the main selling point. You can dynamically add more drives to the RAID array, and it will automatically resize; both as drives are added and once all drives can support higher sizes (e.g. replace 4 0.5TB drives with 1TB drives your RAID auto-resizes to 2TB to 4TB).
The price is an issue, especially if you buy it with disks included.
Also, the NV+ is long in the tooth and really needs a model with >4 disks (ala the Norco DS-520; 5 SATA, 3 eSATA, 4 USB).

Re:I'm sick to death of four stupid drives

[stderr_dk]

You can fit five 3.5 drives vertically in three 5.25 drive bays, the same amount of space as most four-bay enclosures use. Yeah, you could do that, if you don't care about the heat produced by the drives.