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

I bought this NAS (RN212) 6 months ago as a backup drive. Installed drives from 2 to 4 TB, the installation went very quickly and without problems. Turns out I bought a Plex Pass account, installed Plex directly on the NAS, and moved all my media to it. The admin page is pretty easy to use, and ReadyCloud allows me to back up my iPhone photos (and share all my media with public groups outside of my network). I had no problems and would definitely recommend this NAS for the price.

The Netgear ReadyNAS 212 is a great storage solution for the home. This device and its intuitive user interface offers ease of use for multiple users and multiple media types. I decided to take the NAS in a slightly different direction and integrate it into my home lab, where it provides NFS data storage for my VMware virtualized environment. It has been seamlessly integrated into my home lab and now serves as an integral part of the environment. I recommend this device for its intended use as…

Setting up this NAS was probably one of the easiest computer/network related tasks I've ever done. Simply install the drives you need into the included brackets that surround the hard drive, slide them into the bays, and power on. Then follow the simple setup steps via the NETGEARS ReadyCloud website. That's all! If you already have a Netgear account, it's even faster. The drives took about 45-60 minutes to format and play a pair of 3TB WD Red drives. Mainly use this as a PLEX media server and…

This ReadyNAS has replaced my dying old ReadyNAS. My plan was to just swap the hard drives from the old NAS to the new NAS. It did not work. I then contacted Netgear to see if they could help me retrieve data from my old drives and they wanted to charge me a lot of money. I've used multiple tools, different Linux distributions, etc. to try and recover my data, but nothing could read the Netgear ReadyNAS RAID-X storage architecture properly. So the main reason I chose this brand was the huge…

This was my third Netgear ReadyNAS. The first two worked great for several years and still work. Bought this for extra capacity. I also bought two hard drives from the approved hardware list. The device only recognizes one drive and despite hours of troubleshooting (including swapping hard drives and multiple factory resets) I have been unable to make any progress. Then I tried accessing "90 Days Free Customer Support" and here is the biggest problem. I've never seen such an effort to make the…

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…

You add two unformatted blank hard drives, connect them to (wired) ethernet, set them up and you have your own NAS. You can then use it to store backups of data or share and stream pictures, music and videos to all devices connected to your network including my Dish Network TV. Plus, it offers the ability to access it from outside your network via the NETGEAR cloud service once you've set up your account. The instructions are clear enough to install the required hard drives and set up the…

I had several NAS for my home; from Synology, QNAP and homemade (FreeNAS/ZFS and CentOS/BTRFS). While I still have a Synology DS411+ at home and an HP Proliant N40L (homemade NAS), I was glad Netgear connected to BTRFS. Netgear is currently the cheapest NAS with BTRFS on the market (at the time of writing this article). Synology will release or release DSM 6.x with BTRFS only for more expensive models. To keep this review short, I will only list the pros and cons of this device. PROS: * BTRFS…