Considering DS410 or Netgear ReadyNAS NV+

[sammyman]

Can someone help me out. I can get the ReadyNAS NV+ for $350 or the DS410 for $500 or the DS410j. I have a few questions. I am leaning towards the DS410 because it is so much newer, updated software and hardware, and looks more mac friendly with Time Machine support etc.

How does the ReadyNAS work with Macs in general? I want to use it for iPhoto, iTunes, and iMovie on a couple computers at home. I am still trying to understand how that whole process would work, but I think I could figure it out. My wife is a professional photographer so we want a safer setup (RAID 5).

I would upgrade the RAM of the ReadyNAS to 1gb. Does that mean it would be faster than the DS410? What about their processors? Would this upgrade help streaming HD movies to my Mac Mini?

I like the idea of having the iphone app to see security cameras when we are away and have babysitters on the DS410. I don't think there are any iphone apps, but can I also hook up IP Camera's to the ReadyNAS?

Any other advice for a complete NOOB to NAS in comparing these two units? I also am wondering what makes the DS410 so much faster than the DS410j? Can you just add some RAM to the DS410j? I am a home user but the performance issues that I have read about the DS410j make me lean towards the DS410...

 

[Bonester]

If you can stretch to either of the Synology units I think you will be a lot happier. The ReadyNAS NV+ is a few years old now and while it works OK it is really quite slow.

I have one with 4 x 500GB enterprise Seagates which is reaching capacity and will be looking at one of the Synology units when I update the hard drives because I can't face waiting for hours for the RAID to resynchronise with each hard drive change.

The ReadyNAS works OK with the Mac, the BitTorrent client & SqueezeBox client work as they should.

For any NAS box on a Mac you just "Connect to Server" from the Finder, put in the IP Address of the NAS, put in any password or connect as a guest and then it appears as a hard drive on the desk top. If you have it partitioned into Backup and Media for instance then you would get two hard drives on the desktop.

The Synology boxes seem to have many more features like mail server and web server and for the performance seems like good value for money.

I think the only IP cameras you could use on a ReadyNAS would be Mobotix which have their own internal DVR's and simply stream data to a storage device so they don't require complex post processing like H.264.

If you look at this link you can compare all the Synology NAS's and it shows that the 410 has a faster processor, wider memory bus, more RAM than the 410j and has Wake-on-LAN but otherwise they share the same features.

It appears that in most models the RAM is not upgradeable.

 

[sammyman]

That is really helpful. Thank you. I know the synology would be better, but it is hard for me to guage how much faster it would really be.

I would just buy the DS410j, but I have read reports that it struggles with performance.

What if I upgraded the RAM on a READYNAS NV+, would it be at all comparable to the synology? Or is the bottleneck something else like the processor?

 

[kirsch92]

If its not to late, I would like to interject something here. I have been doing some research myself as I want to do the NAS thing soon.

The problem will be iPhoto. iPhoto needs to be on an HFS+ formatted drive. Even worse, some of the posts on Apple support pages show that iPhoto 9 has serious speed problems unless its on the internal drive.

Since most NAS's are ext3 formatted it could cause problems.

I would do some more digging before you leap in.