Netgear ReadyNAS NV+ v2

[Chewy509]

Anandtech has a review of the refresh of the Netgear ReadyNAS line of products...

http://www.anandtech.com/show/5071/netgears-marvell-based-readynas-nv-v2-review/1

Not bad performance, up to 89MB/s in certain scenarios, but I find the price a little steep for what you get. ($399 for the NV+ v2 diskless).

The HP N40L Microserver starts around $300, and you can load up any server OS you want (including Windows Home Server, Windows Server, Linux (REHL is a supported OS), and there are reviews of FreeBSD and OpenSolaris supporting all the hardware natively). Yes, there is more work in the latter, but you get something more tailored to your needs.

[sechs]

Netgear has really screwed the product line over. The SPARC-based devices were much more efficient.

[Chewy509]

Netgear has really screwed the product line over. The SPARC-based devices were much more efficient.
I think they just went with scale of economy in choosing parts (eg going with more common parts to reduce cost), rather than going for the best engineering solution.

[sechs]

They also allowed the software team to go way off the deep-end with add-ons. Which got even more complicated when they had to maintain both SPARC and x86 code.

Now, they've added an ARM-based set of options, it's bound to be worse.