NetGear Ready NAS v. Buffalo Terrastation? What is a NAS Anyway?

If you are thinking about a NAS drive, Buffalo Terrastation v. NetGear Ready NAS appear to be among the best choices.  I have written about both of these in the past and have overall been happy with both, but which is better?

To add more confusion, my recently acquired ReQuest F3 Server and IMC and Request Supports the NetGear Ready NAS 1100 and LaCie 2Big and 5Big Drives, and I'll briefly cover all of these for you, but first, what is a NAS?

NAS is short for Network Addressable Storage.  Basically it is a big hard drive that you can put on your home network and share with other computers.  Sort of like having a mini cloud server in your house.  You can buy direct NAS meaning they have one hard drive and if it fails you lose it all, or you can get a RAID ready NAS and if one drive fails, you can replace it and not lose a thing.

I prefer NAS over cloud services for data storage and archiving for a couple of reasons.  First, the tech industry is littered with the remains of great ideas from great companies that are no longer used, and that is hiding the bigger problem of the long gone tech companies.  What happens to your photos and music when the company changes gears or goes under?  With a NAS you only lose your data if you lose your house and even then, my NAS is on the list of ten things to take with me right after wife, dogs, wallet and car keys.

The big difference between the Buffalo Terrastation and the NetGear Ready NAS NV+ became apparent quickly this week.  I have had some difficulty with permissions on my Ready NAS ever since going all mac in the house.  My ReQuest Server says the response time is too slow for audio or video, which is odd since it's cousin the ReadyNAS 1100 is supported by ReQuest.

So I dusted off the old Buffalo Terrastation which looks really bad after the TSA unpacked it and tossed it in my luggage.  Amazingly broken and dented, it still works.  I bought the NetGear because I was mad at Buffalo for not offering an empty case for sale, and telling me to buy a new NAS.

When I plugged in the Buffalo, the mac network found it and logged on quickly.  No read/write errors or permission problems at all.  I think this has to do with the security on the NetGear side, but I don't know and honestly I don't care.  I know the Buffalo Terrastation works, and it has always worked fine as my ReQuest Server NAS drive even though it isn't supported by ReQuest.

After telling the new ReQuest F3 the IP address of the Buffalo Terrastation and rebooting, the Request found all of my movie and music files.  The only thing it would say about the Netgear was "test failed".

If you need to access your data anywhere, try a DDNS service so you can get to your home server securely from anywhere like.   The WD MyCloud Server could be a great solution, but I haven't tried it yet.  If someone has, let us know how it works.

My configuration is RAID 5 on both the Netgear ReadyNAS and the Buffalo Terrastation.  I don't like loading music and I don't like losing data.  For me RAID and NAS is way easier than "the cloud".