App review - hard to use – NETGEAR Insight Review

This is NOT a renew of the hardware but rather the software and the installation/setup process which was rather like watching Scotland trying to qualify for the World Cup: disappointing and irritating. First the app forces portrait mode rendering my iPad Pro with a keyboard rather useless. The setup is not very intuitive and perhaps confusing if things are done in the ‘wrong’ order. I purchased a NAS214 and four 12TB disks, the max configuration for this device. Putting the disks in before configuring the device maybe made things more difficult. As soon as I put the disks in and power on the device it started syncing the data. I let this run for about 5 hours and then powered down to get this app and configure the device. After configuration was done the device was recognized, on my LAN with an IP. Status showed it configured as RAID5 giving about 37TG. With about 12 hours of resyncing the formatting is about 1/3 complete. With RAID5 there is no need to write 48TB of zeros. You can write the control structures only. No real validation of the ‘health’ of the disk is accomplished by this as its almost certain the the controller with ‘eat’ bad sectors with no errors until the free pool is exhausted. You only to a setup once so if the hardware is reliable I would probably get a bigger one of these if all goes well.
Review by DTD41z on NETGEAR Insight.