Netgear price grab with Infrant ReadyNAS

I don't know if anyone else has been considering the purchase of an Infrant ReadyNAS around here, but I have and in the past year or two their devices had certainly developed a very loyal following at AVS. It was clearly superior to competing products, actively developed and supported, relatively Mac friendly and, best yet, was usually available "diskless" for somewhere between $550-$649. That way you could buy bare drives yourself when you found them on sale.

Well, those days appear over now that Netgear bought Infrant: in the past month or two, remaining diskless stock gradually sold out and rebranded Netgear ReadyNAS NV+ have finally shown up in the channel again and it isn't a pretty sight:

The NETGEAR ReadyNAS NV+ Core "Diskless" RND4000 is now $849 at newegg, which makes the 2x500GB drive version for $1049 "seem" like a bargain.

Here's what also seems clear to me: Netgear plans to charge each new customer a $200 premium to help finance their buyout of Infrant.

For me, it looks like I'll be reconsidering my array of RAID 0, 1, JBOD external enclosures, Leopard Time machine via USB of the gigabit Airport extreme and rolling your own NAS by stuffing drives in a Powermac and adding PCI expansion cards, host adaptors and RAID controllers.

There's always a chance, methinks it's calculated. Check the new reference pricing: $899 and the channels: Dell, PCNation, MacMall, Newegg, Buy.com: all for between $827 and $920 shipped. Our only hope for more reasonable pricing is customer backlash and poor sales.