Thread: FANTASTIC New Toy

Very, very nice.

Do the drives spin down?

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

Cheers
Simon

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

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

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?

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?

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

G'day Guys,

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

http://www.infrant.com/wiki/index.ph...atibility_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 .

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

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

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

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)...

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

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)