Ease of Management – The Nas is almost plug an play. Simply connect it to your network and it will get a DHCP address and then use the RAIDar utility that ships with it to do the initial configuration. Once that is complete you can fully manage the Ready Nas from the HTTPS GUI. The GUI is easy to use, understand and has email alerting. Creating shares and assigning them permissions is very easy especially if you have configured the AD integration. Over all this appliance is very user friendly and time saving.

Feature Set – The Ready Nas has Active Directory integration. This made my situation very easy since I do have over 250 users on my network. The Read Nas simply connected to active directory and pulled the user accounts over along with all security group, It extended my active Directory structure and made my life easy.
The Ready Nas 1100 also has a built in print server, retrospect backup installed and integrated, Streaming services, and ftp. I don’t really use any of the extra features other then FTP Since I strictly use this appliance as a backup location.

Performance and Reliability – I have noticed that the Ready Nas is sluggish in its web GUI, It is not overly bad just more of an annoyance. The Ready Nas comes with 4 SATA Segate drives (7200 rpm). The drives are meant for capacity not speed. It you are using it as a backup or file server it will be fine. The drives are automatically put in a raid 5 when all the drive bays are full. A really nice thing about the Nas is if you have 4 – 750 gig drives and you upgrade one to 1 Tera byte, the Nas automatically adjusts the free space to give more and maintains its raid 5 array. This process though is a bit slow when it is initializing the drive it can take up to 5 hours depending on how much data you have. The Nas also comes with redundant Network cards, and has 3 built in fans. Once email alerting is configured the Nas will email any failures or abnormalities it detects. Another way to monitor health is to log on to the GUI and click Status -> Health. It will give a breakdown of all the components.

All in All this is a solid appliance that has being working for me without any issues for a year. It fulfills all my backup needs and has AD integration.