NETGEAR RR2312H8-100NES ReadyNAS 1U 12-Bay High Density Rackmount Network Attached Storage, Half Populated 6 x 8TB Enterprise HDD

First complaint was that the package arrived inside an external Amazon box and on opening that, the Netgear box had clearly been opened and resealed at some point. Not what is expected on a brand new item. I raised this with Amazon who were pretty unconcerned.As for the product itself.No surprises with the rack fitment, though it doesn't come with rack mount bolts (crazy as it's a rack mount item).Drives are easy to install, though they're not screw-less so make sure you have a small posidrive available.Once up and running the interface is pretty straightforward and easy to navigate around. Shares are easy to set up, as are multiple users.Notification emails can also be configured to alert on a variety of conditions, really handy when one of the drives failed - not the fault of the unit, rather the low build quality of WD NAS specific hard disks, this is the 2nd replaced in the last 6 months, I have older Seagate drives which have had no issues.All in all a pretty decent NAS which is suitable for home or small business, and for less than a comparable Synology.

Does exactly what we need. Adding to an overloaded core server this new one is part of our busy internal network, with daily external backups and overnight cloud sync too. We've used ReadyNas in various incarnations over the years and continue to be happy with the ease of use. Hot swopping hard disks is easy too, as hard drive failures are an occasional feature of always-on NAS drive technology.

My previous NAS box was reaching the end of supported life, so I thought I'd take the opportunity to upgrade to a home rackmount storage.The box mounts on the front 19" posts only. I did have concern prior to buying it whether this would be a stable enough support, but it is absolutely fine.Very happy with it.

Nice and quick, I used 4 x 4TB reds. It is used a a backup repository to speed them up so no read write access from users.

I received this as the diskless version - I have mounted 4 x 1 Tb drives to begin with, and am impressed with the performance. It can be loaded with significantly more storage as well if needed.While this is not a market leading spec, the performance is more than enough to manage a small to medium business or office, and for the price is one of the best choices on the market at the moment unless you need ultra-top-end performance.The NAS itself is well made and solid - just what I'd expect from NETGEAR, it was an easy install into our rack setup, and fitting the drives was very simple as well.The firmware is top notch as well, with the built in features all working nicely out of the box, and I can trust that the safety features will work well.The 3 included fans are quiet, and once mounted the drives are secure and are barely audible either, it is certainly one of the quieter setups we have on our rack.All in all, a very good choice if you need additional NAS capacity, the inbuilt features are all solid and reliable and installation is easy.

I am probably a fairly typical kind of user for a product like this. I've set up our home office network and set up a NAS before, but I'm not an expert. If I encounter a problem I know how to use Google to sort out most things.We do our backups to the cloud these days but always worry that we need to have our data backed up somewhere that is entirely under our own control too, and that's where this NAS comes in. It looks really cool sitting on a shelf in our office, although we leave it turned off whenever possible because it's noisy, even when you set it to quiet mode.Unfortunately I didn't feel like splashing out a couple of hundred quid on brand new hard drives so I used two HDDs from old PCs, a 2TB drive and a 750GB drive. I followed the instructions supplied with the ReadyNAS 2304 to reformat my drives and it was an absolute pain, wasting about five hours that I'll never get back. It's possible that the sequence of steps that I took could have been done in a more logical order, but despite looking at various help articles on Netgear's site I was unable to do anything but proceed in a trial-and-error fashion. If you're using brand new drives you might have a much better time. The instructions say you can set the 2304 up in 15 minutes. I think that's wishful thinking.Among the problems I encountered were that the ReadyNAS prefers you to set up a RAID array, but I wanted to just use my two hard drives as separate drives. To do this I let the ReadyNAS set them up as RAID (I couldn't seem to stop it), then followed the online help to "destroy" my drives and re-set them up as individual drives. This took many hours. If I'd made the mistake of storing any data on my drives mid way through this process I'd have lost it. I'm sure an experienced user would feel nothing but contempt when I make such an obvious statement, but if you're NOT a seasoned user you would be wise to consider whether this is the right product for you.While I'm talking about problems I'll list a few more. For many years I've avoided installing Java on any of our PCs. It's not required for any programs we run, it seems like a security risk to me, always updating. Unfortunately to set up your ReadyNAS on your PC you'll need to install Netgear's RAIDar software which requires Java. When you install Java remember to unchek the box that suggests you change your homepage to Yahoo. I thought I'd put all that behind me. You only need RAIDar installed on one PC, so maybe use an old machine just for that purpose? Using RAIDar it's very easy to set up your NAS on your network and I'm sure it's possible to do some very clever things with user access rights to the folders you set up, but we've kept our setup simple.Another problem I encountered while setting up the 2304 was that initially I couldn't log in to the admin control panel using RAIDar. It wouldn't let me use the default username and password. Possibly this was because I installed previously formatted drives, or maybe I did something in the wrong sequence. Netgear's help site told me I had to do a factory reset of the device and it immediately did a firmware update. I didn't allow this to frustrate me, but it really makes me doubt Netgear's claim of a 15 minute setup time.I've said enough about problems, I'll just make a few more comments. Firstly there is a big community of app developers so you can add clever functionality to your ReadyNAS 2304 but I'm not interested in any of that. I just want simple storage, which makes me wonder whether this is an unnecessarily complicated product for my needs. The 2304 does have a nice removable disc caddy system and I'm hoping to install more drives in future at which point its capacity for more drives will reveal it as a logical product for me.I mentioned that the 2304 is noisy - I like a nice quiet office and all of our PCs are designed to be as quiet as possible. You turn on the 2304 and it's like someone in a neighbouring house is using a chainsaw. Not too many decibels, but an annoying sound to my ears. It also uses about 48 Watts of power, so I'd rather leave it turned off whenever possible. I'm sure if you have a server room, or a rack mount in a cabinet you won't be troubled by the noise.I was impressed by the speed of file transfers using the 2304 - I backed up a couple of terrabytes of data from two PCs - lots of small files - and over our network this didn't take a frustratingly long time.In summary - if you really value your data (which I'm sure you do!) then make sure you know what you're doing when you configure the 2304.