A few months ago I purchased a iomega UltraMax. At the time it seemed like a sensible choice and to be fair it did work as expected. I plugged it to my MM (MacMini) and could back up my MBP (MacBookPro) and MM nicely. Plus I could share my music, videos, etc. to other computers on my network. On top of that it supported RAID-1 so my data could survive a disk failure.

Well, the problem is that about a month ago it suddenly stopped working. It started indicating that both disks had a failure. WHAT??? BOTH DISKS??? I thought I lost all my data (10 years of photos, all my music and personal files). I decided to take a look directly at the disks via a USB enclosing (once I managed to find one). It turned out both disks were just fine (what a relief!!!). It was in fact the UltraMax disk management system which decided to give up all together.

So what was the next move? Well, I decided that a more robust solution was the only way forward so I started looking around for a NAS drive. And at the end of my search I set my sight on the NetGear ReadyNAS NV+.

I’ve had it running for a month and I’m really happy about it. It runs with 4 500GB disks in what NetGear call X-RAID (automatically picks the best RAID configuration based on your disk configuration). It also comes with an iTunes streaming server, BitTorrent client and supports UPnP. That’s really cool because I can then watch videos or listen to music straight from my PS3. It’s obviously more pricey than my old kit but it is definitely worth it.