Selfelected

Review of Netgear ReadyNAS Duo RND2110 1TB

Just installed a Netgear ReadyNAS Duo RND2110 1TB.

+ Small.

+ 2 disks with a variety of RAID.
– Unfortunately with a proprietary solution called Xraid which we know nothing about.  This is considered Not Good for a device that manges data.  What if a disk fails?  Is it readable again?  Noone knows since Xraid is proprietary.

+/- Outside transformator.  Make it easier to place but one more thing lying around.  For me it was good.

+ Easy to reach disc bays.

( – Noisy.
Noisy like a fan running at full speed.  Always.  Netgear themselves have written that the developers took the drive to the bedroom to make sure it was quiet.  My comment: 0ne developer was deaf and the other had the device turned off. It might be faulty unit I have.
UPDATE: replaced the unit without any problem and the new one was quieter.  There was some error where the machine didn’t recognise the fan. )  I won’t say it is quiet because it isn’t.  But it isn’t noisy.

– The hard drives that came with the machine has gotten louder.  Unfortunately I cannot remember the name of them and am too lazy to open up and check.

+ Dropped some movies into the folder called media.  Started an xbmc client on a laptop, browsed the LAN, chose, and the  movies streamed.

+ At first glance (I haven’t researched) the site/forum/users at readynas.com seems good.  Having a user base and a community is good.

+  Supports Time machine for Mac.  But it only supports 1 client since the user name is hard coded.

– Slow web admin interface.

– Crashes once in a while.

+ Supports dyndns but only with a 3 letter suffix.  E.g.: not myname.dyndns.info.  I guess it is the 3 letter suffix that is the culprit at least; I got …dyndns.com working.

+ It can report errors both through built in SMTP server and through logging in to gmail and send from there.

+ Easy to setup backup.  Just connect a drive to USB, or find a windows share or an FTP or some other endpoints I cannot remember now.  Choose weekdays to backup and which folders (has some choosings) and whether to backup all or inrementally (and overwrite once a week or so).  Seems a bit slow though.  Can report automatically both errors and success per email.

Review of Electrolux ultrasilencer 3980P vacuum cleaner

In short:

The least noisy vacuum cleaner I have tried.  I would buy it again.

Longer:

It is the least noisy vacuum cleaner I have tried.  Calling it quiet is simply wrong.
A cushion is quiet.  A computer hard drive can be said to be quiet. An idling 200hp car engine is less noisy than this vacuum cleaner.

To compare: one can have a conversation beside it with only a slightly raised voice. One can listen to music from a hifi if one doesn’t listen to the music but just hear it.  But only if the cleaner is set to level 3 of 5.

At level 5 it is still less noisy than other cleaners I have tried, but forget talking without it being painful.

The metal tubes are oval-squarish.  This means one cannot use it for hand tools in the garage which always have round tubing.  The tubes’ connections are fastened with buttons which feels alright.  I cannot say f it is better or not than regular round-tube-friction-connections.

There is no locker for extra tools in the machine but they/it are/is on the tubes, by the handle.  Bigger machine or clumsier tubes; a matter of taste.

I can’t say if the suction is better or worse.  The handle likewise.  Corner handling likewise.

I would like to give kudos to the manufacturer for finally finding out that users don’t like noisy machines but I don’t; since it took them waay to long time.  100+ years.