Netgear releases beta of RAIDiator 4

by Volker Weber

For those more adventurous than myself, here is RAIDiator 4.00b2-p2-T1.

Comments

Real smooth update here. And except for the butt ugly web interface (ok, it's not finished yet, I know) it seems to work better than 3.x - if you can for the moment live without the print server feature, which isn't working in this beta.

Stefan Rubner, 2007-08-06

I made the mistake of buying a Netgear Zetera (SC101) network attached storage device. The software is so horrendous as to be completely unusable and makes me reluctant to purchase another Netgear product. This is one of three or four netgear products I own which appear to be excellent ideas, good hardware, and crappy software.

To me, their Zetera network drives moved them into the same category as ASUS. See, everyone seems to dig Asus. They get rave reviews on their system boards and controller cards. The performance tweakers dig all the settings. Thing is, they ship products with unreadable manuals and software that is barely (if at all) stable, and even the software update process isn't any good. I've ceased buying Asus products and I've become damn close to the same place with Netgear.

Andrew Pollack, 2007-08-07

Yeah, ditching ASUS and buying DELL. That may be a good thing for Netgear. :-)

The Zetera and Infrant products have two things in common: the letters a and t. If you read vowe.net carefully, you would have known that the Zetera devices inspire to be a SAN instead of a NAS. They don't implement proper open protocols like FTP, NFS or SMB. Which makes them unusable without their client software. And that is always a bad idea.

Volker Weber, 2007-08-07


Keeping up with all the material out there is difficult. This was a purchase of convenience and I was frankly surprised when I got it home that it wouldn't handle any of those protocols -- you're 100% right.

That too, however, reflects very badly on Netgear. The value of a brand is greatly diminished if you cannot associate it with a degree of value, quality, compatibility, and general usefulness.

When I travel in the U.S., I usually stay at Marriott branded hotels. It isn't that they're exceptional when compared with properties under the Hilton brand for example, its the fact that they are extremely consistent. Once you understand the way they break down the properties by name, you can be almost certain of what the place you're staying will be like. That's terribly generic and some people prefer variety -- but on business trips, the consistency of the brand means I don't have to do much investigation. That's also why people eat at McDonalds. It surely isn't the food quality.

What Netgear has done is put out garbage like my Zetara "toaster" with the same branding as their better products. It means I can't just walk into a local store and buy a Netgear product now. First, I have to go to vowe.net or other (obviously less reliable) sites first and spend time on it.

I'm not sure, from your comment on Asus and Dell what you mean. I've been buying Dell laptops for years and liked them, but for servers and workstations I tend to build my own. From that perspective I was comparing Asus with other board manufacturers like MSI -- which I've had excellent experiences with, or even Intel which is a top quality product but a bit expensive by comparison.

Andrew Pollack, 2007-08-07

> It means I can't just walk into a local store and buy a Netgear product now.

Actually, that's fairly easy: Netgear has two distinct product line-ups. First, there's the home user equipment for the mass market. These are the "white" products, meaning that the hardware is housed in a white plastic box (like your SC101). Second, there's the professional line with the "blue" products. There the hardware sits in a blue metal box. Ok, well, I hope they won't do either to the ReadyNAS products. But still, it's a good rule of thumb to go for the blue line if you expect somewaht more professional features - like you seem to do.

Stefan Rubner, 2007-08-07

Old vowe.net archive pages

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