NETGEAR Insight

I was hesitant to replace the Apple Airport Extreme Base Stations in my business as they have done their job. Unfortunately, I have way more WiFi devices that I needed to support and it was time for a commercial grade solution. After a lot of research and taking to Linksys and Netgeae individually I decided to go with the Access Point and Managed POR switches that are cloud managed by their Insight Platform. I couldn’t be happier. From setup to ease of use of the app. It has been an amazing experience.

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OK Netgear, people actually use their iPad horizontally not vertically. And some actually type either on the screen or with a keyboard and the keyboard is horizontal. OMG if its designed for iPad, at least test it on an actual iPad. Or even an iPhone for that matter. Think horizontal. My second issue is: REALLY? You are going to charge per device? OMG just another way to extract money from your loyal base. The third issue is the extreme labor intensive way to add each device. Seriously there is no option to have it search an existing, functioning network and you simply supply the password for all or each device? Unbelievable. And create another account/password and alternately use Facebook credentials as an alternative? Please think about IT security. On the positive side, the interface is very pretty. The layout from what I saw before I gave up was clear and appeared easy to work with. But I suspect very few will have the time/patience to set this up and then find themselves with another yearly/monthly $ draw from their assets. Netgear makes great products and this app, if fixed, should be FREE as it would encourage more purchases of their products.

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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.

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Here’s what the onboarding experience is like. You try to sign in through Facebook and the Netgear app kicks back an error. So you try to paste in your long password but it won’t even pull up the “paste” menu on double tap. Thus encouraging you to reset password and create a weak one you can memorize and easily type in. So you hit reset password. You get an email that takes you to a reset page. You put in new password and page loads an expired error even though the email is 10 seconds old. Horrible experience.

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This is an impressively bad app. Although I don’t actually know all about it, since I can’t even get past the setup screen - the link to create a netgear account doesn’t work on my iPad. Combine that with the lack of landscape mode functionality and so far even 1 star seems generous. Really not happy to have my new $500 NAS held hostage, I think this is going back to the store for a different brand. Netgear seems to seek to destroy what used to be a quality name - buyers should look elsewhere.