Have you taken a "feature test drive" of Synology, QNAP and others? Their web sites allow you to use your web browser to operate their product on demo, on line.
This review seems to say that the Netgear features are basic NAS/backup. The many media sharing, remote access, and so on features standard in Synology/QNAP are 2year old programs you have to download and install/configure. I've never used one of these Netgears, but I am forever sour on Netgear NASes having bought one some 4 years ago and its software was beyond awful. Then too, maybe they're better now. I admit to holding a grudge.
From a June, 2011 posting:
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/networking/display/netgear-readynas-ultra2_6.html ...
As we’ve noted ..., the Ultra 2’s basic firmware only includes key network features and a couple of add-on modules. The rest of features can be installed as individual modules of which there are plenty available. In most cases you have to download the module file to your PC and then install it onto the NAS but Netgear seems to be preparing a full-featured online catalogue for installing add-ons directly from the NAS’s web-interface.
Most of the add-on modules have individual setup and management interfaces and place links to them in the NAS’s main web-interface.
ReadyNAS Photos is a rather old add-on module that hasn’t been updated for a couple of years. It is not very easy to use as you have to install a client tool on your PC and register at a website.
The BitTorrent module is going to be the most popular, we guess. It was created by the namesake developer three years ago but it seems to be so stable as to require no updates. You can specify the folder to store files in, choose a connection port, limit the speed of downloading and seeding, and set up a task completion condition (a certain rating or time period). This client works fairly well but it is not handy in terms of remote management because it does not allow to protect its web-interface with a password. So, if you are going to use P2P networks extensively and manage download tasks remotely, we’d recommend you to consider alternative modules such as MLDonkey or Transmission.
Talking about add-on modules, we should also mention the SqueezeCenter media service which supports Squeezebox series media players and Orb, a tool for accessing the NAS’s media library (including photos, music and even videos) via the Internet from different client systems such as PCs and mobile devices.
The number and functionality of add-on modules is quite satisfactory, but
Netgear itself seems to be not paying much attention to their development. It’s also not very nice that some mobile clients (for ReadyNAS Remote and Orb, for example) are not free. Of course, most users are not going to need them at all, but the consequence is that Netgear’s products may look inferior to other brands’ in terms of firmware capabilities.
