Review on 📦 NETGEAR ReadyNAS RN212: High-Capacity Diskless Personal Cloud NAS with Desktop & Mobile App by John Hall

We needed a new NAS to replace the one that suddenly broke. This one looked like what we needed, so we bought some new discs and decided to give this one a try. Right out of the box, this thing was very disappointing. The setting was designed to keep idiots out, but we couldn't set it up properly. The volume could not be created for no reason, the diagnostic options in the web interface failed literally every time without explanation. Performing the same operations produces different results. The device seemed to work for a few days and then stopped working for no apparent reason. I swapped out hard drives if they went bad. I've reformatted drives more times than I can count. I've scoured the forums looking for solutions to each of the many problems I've encountered. I contacted support and received no response. In the two months that caused the aneurysm that I had this thing, it worked for a total of 8 days. Every time it started and ran it would suddenly refuse access to disks and refuse to do anything without converting volumes - and getting rid of any data I might have been trying to generate on the disk. The network device has hooks, but it's not funny. I already lost data when I thought it finally worked (I might add, with RAID). It's possible that both of my new drives are bad, but I couldn't know since the diagnostic tools don't really work. My computer can't find hard drive errors no matter the cost. I even tried a different modem thinking the problem might be with the old one - no. The NAS still resets randomly. Even if everything works, the software is terrible. The web interface is full of options that don't really work, confusing messages and useless "diagnostics". The Android app allows you to view but not open the data on your device. I'm not sure why they bother at all. I went through the return window trying to get rid of this horrible thing. So now I'm $200 poorer, a few steps closer to having a stress-related heart attack, lost a few workdays, and no closer to what I wanted when I started -- just accessing my data on more than one device.