Meanwhile, the NAS have evolved considerably and also the subject of cloud is no longer so indispensable. Especially the latter was yet again to take a look for me the reason.
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The hardware:
Delivered is the NAS as a "barebones", ie without hard drives here. That leaves a choice of desired brand and series. I'm working now very happy with Western Digital Red hard drives. These are specially designed for the NAS mode (RAID and 24/7), quite economical and have a good data throughput for large files. Programs but one should rather not install on the network drive then.
The built-in fan does not say to me, and in my opinion is also a bit far oversized. With a maximum of 106 m³ / h per minute could be well 560 times to replace the air in the NAS or sucked into an hour and a half times the air of a typical living room by the NAS! Why? I have replaced the fan against a Noctua NF-B9 (92mm). This creates a maximum of "only" 64 m³ / h, but is optimized for low rotational speeds and is usually with de facto inaudible 800 U / min (which should under 10 dB (A) at 30 cm yield) from the NAS operated.
With correspondingly quiet hard drives can have the NAS are so right next to the mouse on the desk and listening, except a faint clunk in connection with access, nothing. The HDD temperatures are 34 ° C (25 ° C ambient temperature) in order, almost too low. Solely the small processor is very warm (about 50 ° C at idle), as well as the serial ventilation. This is due to, on the CPU based, expresses suboptimal cooling concept of the Netgear RN102.
The transfer speed is OK, but could be better. Good 65 MB / s when writing I create videos that HDDs were here easily the Gbit LAN (~ 120 MB / s maximum) can bring to the limit. When writing small files (Office, back-up from the server (PHP scripts), thumbnails) then interrupts power to partly under 10 MB / s. Here the little chip will then appear to run out of steam.
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Software / Cloud:
But for me both was more of a secondary nature, as the back-ups are not as time-critical and I prefer to build my "personal cloud", to which I can access and work with colleagues worldwide. Even though I really like working with SkyDrive, the data is yet still outsourced and I have charged only 25 GB. That is not enough to manage for a large photo archive in high quality or to extensive work projects.
The user administration in the local network is solved very intuitive and allows for advanced users a very deep rights award. The cloud features are, however, even after several firmware updates a pure impertinence. If you want to set even halfway complex access rights - and the cloud users also happens to be so called as a local - can partly not even create new folders let selbige see.
For each "upper folder" Snapshots can be created, ie the NAS made to incremental backups and can reset the folder to a specific date. The function can be for each folder individually enabled / disabled and set the interval from hours to weeks. Thus, you can see the snapshots, as necessary, to use a lot of sense.
XRAID2 than RAID system very beginner-friendly and even hot-pluggable, meaning they can once get started with a single HDD and then plug another during operation, the NAS will take care of everything else. Can really make fullest one XRAID2 the RN102 not, that would go until three or four hard drives really make sense.
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Conclusion:
I am very pleased with the Netgear ReadyNAS RN102. The hardware is good, the processing also, but not high-end. With a little skill and a new fan you get the NAS but lounge-fit low and the performance is enough to stream movies, photos and music from any problems. Thanks to an optional activated Media Server (DLNA) You can use the NAS with virtually all multimedia devices with DLNA capabilities!
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UPDATE:
Unfortunately - so you have to say it - I have to revise the review again. After I initially pushed the seemingly random freezing in the early firmware and hoped for (fast) recovery, I have my otherwise positive verdict revise unfortunately: The Netgear RN10200 is in everyday life de facto useless. That this is not noticed the colleagues of various IT magazines and here many times a test victory should be recorded ... only understandable, because the normal test environments are likely to situations where there is a problem, do not depict.
The problem is on the one hand the meager performance in multimedia data. DLNA I had this very quickly suspected as particular reaches the CPU load absurd levels (100%) when loading of media data. On copying for example, their music collection with over 100,000 songs on the NAS, the transfer rate breaks quickly to 10-15 MB / s and regardless of whether you bet on a RAID or not. For the next few hours (or days) remains the NAS from this level. Deactivation of the DLNA server gives here massive improvement and makes the NAS only halfway usable.
Halfway, because it anyway and suddenly again comes to freeze the NAS. It has, for example, photos from your last vacation on the NAS, the photos currently processing and Zack ... the NAS is simply no longer accessible. Time range 5-20 minutes and suddenly it goes again, most simply dragging unnerved after 30 minutes the plug. This partially's enough to open a folder for a pretty "Freeze" - on other days you can easily play 300 GB at a time on the NAS. And no later than this seemingly completely random failures make the NAS useless if you want reasonably productive work with.
My new Conclusion: Stay away! I stay with my 8 Professional Mini PC with Windows. As is true for both the performance, power consumption is also not significantly higher, and the system running smoothly in the 24/7 mode.
