Suggestion - comparison of NAS firmware

[convergent]

I just moved from a four year old ReadNAS NV+ (bought when they were Infrant, not Netgear) to a QNAP TS-659. I'm generally happy with the new hardware, but was surprised at the state of the firmware. It seems that there are a lot of bugs and things that don't work as expected, and I get the feeling that the firmware generally isn't as mature as Netgear. A couple of the things I used in making my decision actually aren't working out to be as useful and I'm finding that although I like the QNAP, had I known more about the state of firmware in the different lines I may have looked more seriously at Netgear.

Is this something that SmallNetBuilder could do an article on?

I'm talking about looking at things like backups... it appears that there isn't nearly as much flexibility in how you do USB backups with the QNAP (still trying to figure it out completely), and the touted higher performing NTFS USB drivers don't seem to work with backing up to a USB drive at all based on feedback in their forum. You wouldn't really figure any of that out by looking at a feature list because they both say they do backup to USB drives.

 

[thiggins]

In each review, I try to point out things that don't work. I can't get everything, but try to get the major items. Folks can help by posting problems found using the new User Review feature that I added not too long ago.

I test USB and network backup for each NAS reviewed, including the QNAPs. I have had no problem backing up to USB or eSATA drives formatted in NTFS, EXT3 or FAT.

 

[claykin]

Tim did an article on NAS backup. See here: http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/nas/nas-basics/30771-backing-up-your-nas-harder-than-it-should-be

Sorry to hear that the QNAP is not all you expected. Maybe they have newer or beta firmware you can try? If not, maybe consider returning it and re-joining the Readynas family??

 

[convergent]

Thanks for the feedback guys. I am aware that the reviews have information about what the firmware can do, but that's not what I'm talking about. My perception is that most of the NAS boxes in a family run essentially the same firmware... so a grid comparing QNAP, Netgear, Synology, Thecus, etc. across different areas of the firmware would put it all in one place, and I think be a valuable "can't find it anywhere but here" resource for anyone buying a NAS. It is also something that could be developed over time, and possibly even a community contribution type of thing.

I'm not planning to return the QNAP box. I will work around the things that are giving me a hard time. I have things about Netgear I don't like either (I've spent almost an entire day trying to get the volume recreated as RAID0 from XRAID). I will have to give the NTFS backup another try if it worked for you. Their forum has a lot of folks reporting problems with it and ext3 or ext4 seemed to be the recommended solution.