Netgear Readynas Duo - Cheap as chips - WHY ?

[AaronD]

Does anyone know if the Netgear Readynas Duo is about to be replaced, or discontinued ?

I only ask, as I am about to buy one, as they have are suddenly appearing online, very heavily discounted, I can now get one as low as £140.

Maybe it is just a sales drive...

Anyone know ?

cheers
Aaron

 

[beisser]

i havent heard anything about beeing discontinued yet.

 

[claykin]

The Duo is a bit outdated from a performance standpoint, but its a fairly reliable NAS. If you don't mind the relatively slow R/W speeds, you cannot go wrong with the Duo.

One thing that irks me about the Duo and NV+ is that the disks are formatted using EXT3 16KB blocks. 16KB blocks cannot be read on conventional PC hardware. At least not with any currently available EXT3 tools. Netgear has taken some heat for this, but they claim that they had to use 16KB blocks otherwise performance would even be worse. So, I highly, highly recommend you regularly backup your Duo share data to external disks (or to cloud backup). This way your data will be accessible via a PC in the event you suffer catastrophic data/hardware loss. yes it happens even with RAID boxes.

Oh back to your original question. It is still current, but I suspect another 2 disk NAS will appear from Netgear later this year. It would surprise me greatly if they didn't release an ATOM based NAS.

 

[AaronD]

Cheers Claykin

Thanks for taking the time to reply to my question.

Regarding your comment on the 16kb blocks, is this a cause for concern ?

What options do you have for accessing the data from the HDD's, in the event the duo fails ? For example, in the event you do not have a current backup.

The device still sounds like a good buy at this price point, especially considering the 3 year warranty.

cheers
Aaron

 

[beisser]

its not a cause for convern if you are savvy with linux and compiling your own kernel with modules, because they you are able to read these disks without any problem.

it is a concern with you are a novice with linux and dont have a clue about kernel and lvm.

but as claykin said. regularily backing up your important stuff is really a must regardless of the blocksize beeing 16k or not. if you lose any data due to not backing stuff up, you can only blame yourself for it.

 

[AaronD]

"it is a concern with you are a novice with linux and dont have a clue about kernel and lvm. "

That would be me then.

 

[claykin]

Cheers Claykin

Thanks for taking the time to reply to my question.

Regarding your comment on the 16kb blocks, is this a cause for concern ?

What options do you have for accessing the data from the HDD's, in the event the duo fails ? For example, in the event you do not have a current backup.

The device still sounds like a good buy at this price point, especially considering the 3 year warranty.

cheers
Aaron

If you have no data backup and your Duo dies your options are:

1) find another Duo to install your disk(s).
2) Find someone with a Sun Sparc workstation or Intel Itanium workstation (good luck!)
3) Send disks to Netgear for data recovery (they probably charge but I'm not sure of cost)

All of the above assumes your data on the disks is intact.

I recommend you use the Duo's built-in backup utility to backup shares to an external disk(s). And/or use ftp/cloud backup to backup data to an offsite server. Netgear now has a Readynas Cloud service launched with V4.1.5 firmware. Its all built into the Duo's Frontview interface and should be easy to setup. Cost is a bit high compared to other cloud services, but its surely convenient for Duo users who don't want to mess about with things..

Keep in mind that cloud backup should only be used for your most critical data unless you've got huge Internet bandwidth (i.e. Verizon FIOS) and don't mind paying for all that off site storage.

If you become a Duo owner, I highly recommend you visit the Readynas site www.readynas.com for up to date information. More than likely your unit will come with older firmware. I highly recommend you upgrade to the latest firmware and watch for future upgrades. Netgear still has a few bugs to iron out and they seem to be on track to address some of the most critical in V4.1.6.