"Hi Mike, I thought I'd give a long-term report on my ReadyNAS Duo. I've used it for about 18 months, and in general, it's worked OK. Originally shipped a single, 750 GB drive (Seagate) with 256 MB memory. I immediately installed a second drive (Samsung F-1). After about a year, it was 75% full, so I swapped out the disks for 1.5TB Seagates (ST31500341AS). Upgrading was easy - swap in one drive, wait a day (disk synchronization), swap in another, wait another day, and then reboot.
One of the reasons I purchased a ReadyNAS Duo was the use of a generally available file system: ext3. This means that if something should happen to the controller hardware and the NAS is no longer supported, I can use something else to read the drive. I can take out one of the drives and connect it to my Mac, reading it using MacFUSE. I believe that for now, the maximum drive that can be used in a ReadyNAS Duo is 2TB.
There were several smaller issues with the box. The web admin interface was pretty slow, often taking several seconds to respond. At least twice I heard long periods of drive activity when none was expected, and after reviewing the logs I suspect that no real memory was available, so the NAS was struggling with virtual memory. Each time a restart brought things back to normal. (I used only the AFP and CIFS protocols.)
One of the drive activity lights got dim (compared to the other one). And the drive carrier mechanism for both drives no longer work very well - it takes a lot of effort and fiddling to get either drive to release.
A firmware update from Netgear enabled Time Machine, and it works as expected. Before using TM, I upgraded the memory to 1GB about six months ago, and the admin interface got much snappier.
Note that Netgear says this system has a SATA-1 (1.5Gbps) interface to the drives. With 1Gbps Ethernet port, probably wouldn't make any difference if it were SATA-2.
The ReadyNAS is used as a Time Machine for my MacPro, plus a network repository for media. Performance via AFP is as follows (it sits on the other side of two Netgear GB switches):
Read: 1GB file - 0:20; 205MB folder with 1,850 files from 50K - 50MB: 0:22
Write: 1GB file - 0:57; 205 MB folder - 0:55
One area where the ReadyNAS (and for that matter all the hardware in my office) has exceeded expectations is ability to work in warm operating environments. I work in a converted, un-a/c'd garage. In general the climate is quite mild here. But, several times a year it gets over 90F. It's never missed a beat.
In summary, the unit provides RAID-1 backup and serves files while allowing me to sleep my MacPro. While it has worked out so far, I will evaluate other solutions when it comes time to replace it.
Best, Kevin"
