NETGEAR ReadyNAS 212 2-Bay Network Attached Storage for Personal Cloud with 2x2TB Desktop HDD (RN212D22-100NES)

The nas box itself is built like a tank and I have 4 x 4tb of Seagate discs and all I can say is that it works perfectly and I am very pleased with it. However the Readycloud internet page what you use for your nas drive is appalling rubbish. Setting it up was easy and for a while everything was perfect. About 3 days ago I tried to log on it said my email address was wrong then my password was wrong so then I clicked on 'I have forgotten my password' so they would send me a link to change it. So I changed it and horaah I got on. Today 31st of May I tried to log on I could only get so far and a window came up saying that I would not be able to open anythingelse because the nas box and computer were on separate lan ports.I use a lan port for my computer and in the next port to it is the nas box so once again I am stuck so has I will repeat the nas is very good but trying to get on the web page to see the state of your nas is fraught with difficulty.

Ok, bit of a story but hopefully it's a heads up to others.I had some spare drives lying around so thought i'd pop those into this, 3x 1TB drives and a single 500GB. Configured as X-RAID, the ReadyNAS creates two RAID5 volumes, a 4 disk one of 500GB and a 3 disk one of the remaining 500GB on the 1TB drives. It then presents the sum of that as a single data volume so quite painless and neat.During some configuration, the unit didn't respond and I had to pull the power plug, at this point, it appeared to have lost the configuration and told me that I had to remove inactive disks to use the volumes data and data-0 (the above RAID sets) but the disks weren't inactive. Anyway, since I was just setting up, I put it down to one of those random IT things and carried on.Having set up the volumes, I set to work shoving stuff from a plethora of disks onto this, you know the sort of thing, the family photos, the family videos, all that important stuff. Good plan, after all, this is going onto a RAID store...(you can see where this is going already right?)Next, I thought i'd get smart. Rather than copy from a USB external drive on my PC, across the network to the NAS, why not just connect the USB 3 drive direct to the back of the NAS, surely the copy would be faster on the same hardware than introduce the network.That all went smimmingly...until the last and yes really it was the last file, 7GB, not that that's of specific relevance but as my luck would have it, the NAS fell off the network, it would respond to ping but not the power button. Only one thing for it, pull the power plug.Upon re-inserting the power plug and watching it boot, it flashed to say that drive 3 had failed (well I didn't think it had) but I thought "Uh oh...at least it's RAID!" (are you falling off your chair laughing yet?)So I went into the NAS web admin page to be told... "Remove inactive disks #1,#2#,#3,#4 in order to access the volume data" and as previously, it was showing me the raw data and data-0 RAID 5 sets. Going to the share config in the admin told me that I needed to create a volume first. WTF!You might think, oh well, it was only copying to it but in classic screw up fashion, i'd been deleting as I went from my source disks *bangs head VERY hard*.Now, just to put this into some perspective, there are many things that I'd be very ashamed to have to admit to my wife that i'd done. Telling her how I, an IT guy for 30+ years had just monumentally "lost" all our family pictures and videos was right there at the top of the shame list.Being a holiday weekend, I figured now was the time to turn it off and just leave it before waiting 2 days to get in touch with Netgear support. I rationalised that the data must be there, some part of the config was missing but nonetheless, spent money on volume recovery/undelete software and went at the lengthy process of scouring my original disks to recover what I could.I also had 2 days in which to read/research and see what other experiences people had with these units. Some even report the same issues (or very similar) in Amazon reviews.When I did get through to Netgear the first level support girl was very understanding, had a look at the logs (I'm sure she didn't mind encountering the porn on the PC while looking in the downloads folder for the log.zip file during the remote session) and said "one of the disks isn't on the supported HCL. We had a discussion on this point, I accept the HCL, non compliant statement but pressed my point that the disk that "failed" wasn't the non HCL one and that upon reboot again, it was not showing an error so I believed the error at the time to be a timing related issue or similar.Anyway, she was courteous and escalated me to second level. "Ian" went through his routine (equally competently I might add) and conceded that this was going to be escalated and he wanted to go through the option to enable SSH...except you can't do that if you don't have a volume mounted. Never mind, paperclip in the rear and bring it up in the "Support" mode where it listens on a port. He confirmed that it was accessible and that was the end of his involvement.There the unit sat for a day... patiently waiting to be stroked and teased by a level 3 tech.I did expect a phone call first but I happened to be sitting next to it and noticed it was active, disk activity, then it shutdown and restarted into the running mode. Immediately then came an email from level 3 tech to say he had recovered the volume, take a look.As I write this, I am copying everything off as a backup, as per my original intent.The unit has a choice of several apps which connect to various cloud storage providers for automated backup, one of those will be going on later and I shall also be writing out some Blu Ray discs for backup and looking at a fireproof safe.I will replace the non HCL drive tomorrow, even though I don't see that as a factor here, Netgear wouldn't be unreasonable for denying support as they state they may. I've spent my working career for IT hardware and software manufacturers so I know how that works, the risk was mine.Credit to Netgear support, very professional, courteous, understanding and with a fabulous outcome - HUGE THANK YOU!Once i've got the content secure, i'm going to bully it a bit more and see if I can understand the failure mode, especially when I have 4 HCL compliant drives, then that might be a different discussion but for now, if you too want to avoid utter shame and a divorce lawyer...- This is NOT your only back up solution- Do make regular copies- Don't delete your only original copy- Establish an alternate back up- DO use supported hardware, it avoids those awkward discussions about "but yeah it *should* be ok"- Netgear Support may be able to help if you don't dick around with it and make things worse(All of the above being blindingly obvious to me throughout my career but I thought I was going to be ok just this once yeah yeah, laugh at me now but learn vicariously and don't be so foolish)About the device itself, i'm sure it'll be a wonderful addition to the family IT infrastructure, once i've got past the stage of treating it like a cat that has just scratched my eyes out.I like the iSCSI support, just need bigger disks to make more use of that to create volumes on others machines in the house, plus I need to have more confidence that the thing isn't going to drop the config on me again.The ability to dynamically add bigger drives (one at a time to allow rebuild) and not have to fully backup (hahahaha) and reconfig the RAID sets seems like it should be a nice feature.So at the moment, I'm not unhappy, just bruised confidence and after a few days of bullying it, if I can reproduce it dropping the volume configuration then i'll likely be winging its way back to Amazon.Final words in case they haven't sunk in... you cannot replace those years of lost family pictures and videos, however you can replace the wife but that tends to be expensive (apparently).

A very good item. Instructions are not so clear but the website of the products helps in everythng. A tip: Dont use old hard drive, its easy to set up new disks.

This is a good product but I was replacing old one. It did not say that you had to copy data before inserting old discs and I have lost everything. Hard lesson as all my photos of last 10 years are on there. Hopefully this will help others not do the same

I have spent a long time jumping through many hoops to simply get this gear to even begin to work. Online search shows the problem I have; 'A temporary loss of communication' (the temporary is actually permanent) is well known & has caused a lot of frustration! I opened it a long time after purchase; retirement = got the time to play, so cannot return it to Amazon, I will put it on eBAY.There is nothing wrong with the hardware, it's a software issue - and you need to know what you are doing; ip addresses etc to sort it all out. Online are endless chats with techies asking punters to do this; then that, blah-blah. None of which I understand!So, in a nutshell, quite possibly great if set goes by the numbers - if it doesn't, and you're not fairly well up on it all, give it a miss!

Ran fine for first month.Then a number of issues occurred including it being permanently offline and PC's with the updated client no longer being able to see it.It took a lot of time to get it set up initially; time I can't expend again. Also, even if I get it all going again, can I trust it any more?

What a splendid upgrade from my Netgear Duo that had given me good service for so long. In comparison it is lightning fast and easy to use.