subject: Diskless Netgear ReadyNAS Ultra 4 - How To Buy The Right NAS Hard Drive [print this page] There are at least two reasons why you might want to buy a diskless Netgear ReadyNAS Ultra 4 home network storage device. First, you can sometimes save a little money by buying your own hard drives and installing into a diskless NAS instead of getting a prepopulated home NAS.
Second, if you want to have a fully filled Ultra 4 with maximum capacity of four hard drives, or even if you want RAID5 protection which requires minimum of three disks, you will have to install your own drives since you currently cannot buy a ReadyNAS Ultra 4 with more than two drives; although I expect that to change in time.
When you do decide that you are going to buy a diskless Netgear ReadyNAS Ultra 4 or other diskless home NAS, you then need to choose which NAS hard drives to buy to install.
With Netgear NAS devices it is important that you buy only hard drives on the hardware compatibility list provided by Netgear. It is not that other hard drives do not work, but there can be either performance issues, a glitch you just do not need the hassle of, or the minimum inconvenience of support issues when you want tech help and they tell you that your particular configuration is not supported.
Sometimes there are reasons that they will choose not to include a particular product on the compatibility list and those are drives that you probably want to avoid anyway. High quality drives, which are what you want in your network storage device anyway, are usually not going to be a problem.
Since you might be buying a diskless NAS to save money, you will probably be at least tempted to look at inexpensive 5400rpm hard drives. I would really suggest avoiding those. Sometimes cheap is as cheap does (to misquote Forrest Gump), and just because your home network storage device is protected by RAID1 or RAID5 that does not mean you want the hassle or risk to your data of a drive failure.
At the very minimum, you will notice a performance decrease using 5400rpm hard drives. Often these drives will have a smaller on drive cache also so the combination of slower speed and less cache mean that your home NAS is not going to perform like it could.
Similarly, the 5900rpm "green drives", while newer and better performing than older technology 5400 drives, will still result in about a 10% decrease in performance from better quality 7200rpm hard drives.
One of the reasons to buy a Netgear Ultra 4 NAS is because of the stronger CPU and better performance of previous home NAS devices, so why would you not want to take advantage of that speed by buying the best performing hard drives (within reason) that you can?
Installing 7200rpm hard drives with decent size cache will have a couple of benefits.
First, the drive will give you faster access to multimedia files, especially when multiple users are accessing the NAS device.
Second, the drive will probably last longer since it is a higher quality piece of hardware in the first place.
Third, if the drive happens to be an enterprise class hard drive from the hardware compatibility list then you will benefit from a solid 5 year warranty instead of the typical three year on a decent consumer drive and possibly a 1 year warranty on the cheapest drives available.
