DO NOT BUY. REALLY BAD QUALITY - NetGEAR RNDP600E

[compwizbit]

Pros: Tons of features
Cons: Really really bad product quality and workmanship.

Horrible and unhelpful customer service.
Summary: I am a network admin at my company and have a long and colorful history with NAS.

Recently I purchased NetGEAR RNDP600E drive from TigerDirect.com (CompUSA.com and CircuitCity.com are also owned by Tiger Direct). This was a personal purchase for my home network. Since the day this drive arrived, I have had a very eventful and interesting experience with this purchase. I had to exchnage it twice before finally giving up on this drive. The story is as follows:-

TigerDirect uses a 3rd party drop shipper for selling this item. It means that the item is not sold by TigerDirect, but by a 3rd party. I do not know if this 3rd party gets all the rejected or returned stuff from NetGEAR or if NetGEAR just does not give a d**n about the products it sells, but the drive(s) I recieved were defective.

This is a $1200.00 product. From such an expensive product, I would expect that it would be build very well and would be simple to use (atleast as far as it's physical attributes are concerned).

This drive has 6 drive bays. The 1st drive I received had 4 out of 6 drive bays stuck. The second one I received as replacement had 5 out of 6 drive bays stuck and the third one had 6 out of 6 drive bays stuck.

I tried contacting NetGEAR about it, but they never responded to my emails (I wrote to their sales team at sales@netgear.com. I do have a proof or delivery of my email). I called them and was told that they cannot do much except exchanging it and that I will have to pay the shipping!

I ended up returning the item back to TigerDirect. I did ask their customer service rep if they would be kind enough to route my order to a different 3rd party drop shipper, but was told that they have regional agreements/contracts with the shippers and they cannot route my order toa different drop-shipper.

To sum it up, I'll not suggest anyone to purchase any NetGEAR products. Their customer service literally sucks and they do not care about the customers and small 1 item sales.