FANTASTIC New Toy

[Grizzly_Adams]

G'day all,

A couple of weeks ago I lashed out on a new toy.

A nice neat NAS device for home from Infrant Technologies (http://www.infrant.com) (now owned by Netgear) called a ReadyNAS NV+.

So far I can only rave about how good it is :D

Some of it's features as I see it are:
Nice tidy piece of kit
Relatively online hot-swappable drive upgrades (relatively online in that with the current release of the firmware you need to reboot the NAS once the drives have been initialized)
Can share via CIFS, NFS, AFP and a few other protocols
Built in itunes server
Funky little streaming media server built inJust a great piece of kit :D I'm just wrapped in how well it's going so far :)

Yes I know this could all be done with a PC but I wanted a nice neat and tidy packaged deal where I only had to add the drives and go :)

http://www.planet-shop.eu/images/readynasNV+3.gif

[abaddonxi]

Very, very nice.

Do the drives spin down?

http://www.dansdata.com/gz060.htm

Cheers
Simon

[Grizzly_Adams]

It can do, though I prefer to leave mine spinning (and yes, cop the electricity bill :eek:).

You can also schedule shutdowns and restarts.. so shutdown at 9am and restart at 4pm type stuff. Pretty funky.

Oh it can also act as a USB Print server. I have connected both my printers to it (Colour bubblejet and Laser BW) and it works fine... my only beef as such is it could do with more USB ports, it only has 2 on the back.

Having said that you could probably get around that by connecting a USB hub to one of the ports.. *shrug*

There's a 3rd usb port on the front that has a button above it. If you connect a USB drive to that port and press the button it will copy everything from the [backup] share on the NAS box to the USB drive connected.. pretty funky even though I don't use it :cool:

[jik22]

Interesting....I was just about to order the Thecus equivalent. Tried many of the cheap NAS's over the years, and they all have crap performance...OK for backup, but as soon as you try and stream MPEGs or have multiple people using them at the same time, they're junk.

Will be interested to see how you get on with yours...if you could time some big file copies (Say 4.7GB DVD ISO or similar) over the wire when you get a chance, that would be helpful.

How much, BTW?

[EchiDna]

still pick of the bunch huh?

nearly bought one about a year ago to use as a server for my squeezebox as it has/had slimserver as a standard feature. Subsequently went with external eSATA backup drives (1 at work, 1 at home, swapped monthly) and gave up on the streaming from a NAS...

$800+ without drives - correct?

[dmdigital]

Grizzly, keep me posted on how it goes. Its very similar to the Buffalo Terrastation I run and I am going to need another TB soon.

How good is the print server?
The Buffalo only works as a basic unit so you can't utilise the full abilities of an inkjet printer.

What's the backup feature like?

What size drives will it recognize? I can't seem to find it in the spec's

Cheers
Derek

[Grizzly_Adams]

G'day Guys,

In answer to your questions :) here is the hardware compatibility list:

http://www.infrant.com/wiki/index.php/Hardware_Compatibility_List

At the moment she takes 250's, 500's, and 750 Gb drives - though if you use the 750's you currently miss out on about 40Gb per drive :eek:.

Having said that there is a new release of the OS out shortly (currently in Beta and free for download if you wish) that support up to the 1Tb drives.

I find for my purposes that it works well. Performance is ok but definitely nothing flash. I particularly wanted one to back up my DVD collection, the ability to stream directly from the NAS box was just a nicety and to be honest I haven't seriously looked at it yet.

I use VLC at home and I'm not sure how to use VLC with the streaming options currently on the ReadyNAS - oh and EchiDna it still has a builtin SlimServer as a standard feature :)

So as it stands I'm still investigating how to fully use the Video streaming functions, mainly because I'm not sure what program to use on my Mac yet :angel:

Can't comment on the full print server functionality as I've only used it to print out a few documents in colour (on the bubblejet) and in black and white (on the Laser). Once again I wasn't explicitly looking for a NAS box with a built-in print server, it just happened to have one and that solved another of my problems :)

Cost isn't cheap, when Netgear bought out Infrant they raised the cost a couple of hundred dollars for no particular reason that anyone can see. I paid approximately $1400 (incl. GST and delivery) for mine in Australia, and that was disk-less.

I know people on the forums (whirlpool forum mainly) were talking about it's the only piece of computer equipment that they've purchased that's gone up in value as it got older :eek:

Not sure on the backup feature, I just know it's there (yes I actually RTFM'd). The NAS box is my backup :eek:

jik22 I'll do some copy speed tests and let you know. Seems fine when doing 1 copy but if you try to do multiple copies at the same time she starts hurting (but still responding, just hurting)...

[Grizzly_Adams]

Oh and the infrant forum is a good place for information also: http://www.infrant.com/forum/

[dmdigital]

Thanks for the info. I paid about $1400 for my Buffalo with disks 18 months ago but that was with 4 disks. If it takes 750GB and 1TB drives then that means I could run 2 mirrored pairs. Lots of options :)

Are you running it via 1Gb? I run my present Buffalo through a 1Gb switch so I can backup and share with PC's and Laptops (wireless but I can plug direct in to the switch)

[incisor]

Cost isn't cheap, when Netgear bought out Infrant they raised the cost a couple of hundred dollars for no particular reason that anyone can see. I paid approximately $1400 (incl. GST and delivery) for mine in Australia, and that was disk-less.
holy mesopotamian goose faeces !

you got a train set grizzly?:eek::D

[Grizzly_Adams]

Thanks for the info. I paid about $1400 for my Buffalo with disks 18 months ago but that was with 4 disks. If it takes 750GB and 1TB drives then that means I could run 2 mirrored pairs. Lots of options :)
Yeah it's definitely not cheap, but from the research I did it looked like the best in the market and considering how important the information on there was to me I figured it was worth the cost.

Now days I just buy the disks from Umart (http://www.umart.com.au)


Are you running it via 1Gb? I run my present Buffalo through a 1Gb switch so I can backup and share with PC's and Laptops (wireless but I can plug direct in to the switch)

Yes I bought a little 8-port 1Gb switch so I could get the best throughput to it from my directly attached PC:)


holy mesopotamian goose faeces !

you got a train set grizzly?:eek::D

No, but I do have a very very very understanding wife :angel:

[HangOver]

It looks like an excellent toy but if you can stick 4 or more 1TB SATA drives in your PC wouldn't that save you a whole heap of cash?

I'm gonna have about 700GB, (twin 360s) in my new one, (eventually).

[dmdigital]

It looks like an excellent toy but if you can stick 4 or more 1TB SATA drives in your PC wouldn't that save you a whole heap of cash?

I'm gonna have about 700GB, (twin 360s) in my new one, (eventually).

Means you don't have to muck around with backup space
RAID0/1/5 on a headless computer, fast to boot, very easy to manage, good data security
Cross system compatable (for when I get a Mac)
Will last for several years as its only disks and doesn't need the "latest" stuff (Buffalo is actually a 266MHz PowerPC chipped motherboard!)
Easily accessible to all PC's on the network (or only 1) depending on what's required.

My next PC (Desktop) will have mirrored C: disks (High speed) and 2 scratch disks for photo video editing, but I don't need lots of storage, just multiple spindles for speed. All my storage is via NAS unit and easily expandible.

Much better buy than USB drives or putting storage only drives in PC.

That said I now travel with a 250GB WD Passport drive for my Laptop. It's brilliant!

[Grizzly_Adams]

What he said :cool:

[jik22]

It looks like an excellent toy but if you can stick 4 or more 1TB SATA drives in your PC wouldn't that save you a whole heap of cash?


You would, but you'd lose the flexibility a separate NAS gives you.

Backup for the PC, media server for the squeezebox. Kiss player, etc (And perfect when you have more than one of the above, like I do) plus less to go wrong, cheaper to run than leaving a PC/Server on 24x7 and usually faster access than connecting another PC via a home network to the drives on your main PC (Though this last one only applies to a decant NAS box with it's own processor and lots of memory).

[Grizzly_Adams]

Will be interested to see how you get on with yours...if you could time some big file copies (Say 4.7GB DVD ISO or similar) over the wire when you get a chance, that would be helpful.


G'day jik22,

Just copied over an uncompressed DVD I ripped (not in ISO format, still in original VIDEO_TS etc. format) - 8.54Gb worth - took roughly 16 minutes.

To complete the scenario though some details:

The PC is running Vista 64 Home Premium Edition.
The PC has Sophos Antivirus running on it.
The network is 1Gb.
The ReadyNAS NV+ has 3 x 500Gb drives in its 'RAID-X' configuration - additional speed could probably be gained by adding an extra drive (ReadyNAS NV+ can hold a maximum of 4 drives).

Based on the above I would say it transferred at roughly 546Mb a minute:

8.54Gb * 1024 (to give me the figure in Mb's) / 16 (to give me the transfer rate per minute).

[jik22]

Hmm....AV software shouldn't touch a DVD's native .VOB files though, so that seems slow to me. I'll ask a mate to speed test his Thecus so we have a comparison.