ReadyNAS Pro or not?

[jemski]

Hi,

I'm need to purchase a NAS for a research group of about 30 people, no huge file, mostly word, excel, script, .txt stuff. After spending some time on the web I selected two potential models. Here is my question:

Why should I spent much more money for a Ready NAS Pro instead of getting a QNAP TS509 Pro for way cheaper?

Give me a good raison to ask my boss to spend this money!

Thanks for your help!

Jem

[yoh-dah]

X-RAID2 for hassle-free expansion, 6-bays, better performance, and 5-yr warranty (vs. 1) just to name a few.

[dbott67]

Primary reasons:

1. Support and Service: 5 year warranty vs. 1 year. Plus, you get the support of the ReadyNAS community and product developers and engineers who are constantly monitoring the forums.

2. Designed for Business: Netgear includes "enterprise class" drives for use in high-density devices, like NASes. Higher rotational vibration tolerances and higher mean-time between failures (1.2 million hours vs. 750,000 hrs). Many other products do not include drives in the price or they use "desktop class" drives.

3. Performance: 2-3 times the performance of any NAS in it's class.

4. Future-Proof: X-RAID2 with online horizontal and vertical expansion. As the storage needs of your organization changes, you can easily add new drives or replace existing drives with larger drives without having to worry about moving data off the NAS.

If you factor in the cost difference between the ReadyNAS Pro and it's competitors over the life of the NAS, the ReadyNAS turns out to be a far better value due to it's much longer warranty and superior performance because
you won't be shelling out for a new NAS when users complain it's too slow, or some part of the NAS fails after 3 years and you have to buy a new one.

Your company data is priceless and if you've ever had to recover from a catastrophic data loss, you'll know that no amount of money can retrieve lost data. Better to invest in superior technology, than to regret it later.

-Dave

[jemski]

Ok the 5 years warranty is definetely a very good point for me.

I have a last question, why X-Raid2 is so much better than what the QNAP provide?

Thanks guys,
Jem

[dbott67]

X-RAID2 provides both horizontal expansion (by adding up to 6 drives to the array) and vertical expansion (by replacing smaller drives with bigger drives) while the unit is "online" (i.e. accessible by the users).

Normally, RAID limits the usable amount of space on a drive to the smallest drive in the array. With X-RAID2, you can insert larger drives and the array will utilize the extra space as soon as it can provide redundancy.

See this illustration:

http://www.readynas.com/?p=656

There is a really good explanation from one of the Jedis in this thread:

viewtopic.php?f=20&t=23252#p127978

[jemski]

Alright, thanks for your time guys, I made my decision, ReadyNAS Pro it is.
Cheers
Jem

[Riccardo]

Alright, thanks for your time guys, I made my decision, ReadyNAS Pro it is.
Cheers
Jem

Congratulations, IMHO, you did the best choice.

[dengar]

Jem, please be sure to come back and let us know what you think.