Infrant ReadyNAS NV review
Posted 11 February 2006, 22:24 in Technology 5 Comments
No doubt about it, there’s a growing need to keep data safe. Whether you’re a budding photographer (like me) growing your collection of digital photographs or run a business and have a lot of important documents, you need a way to store your digital files safely and keep multiple copies of it. Of course you could make frequent backup copies of your files on a DVD or a flash drive, but what happens when you forget to make a backup? A reasonable solution is a NAS device on your computer network that has the ability to keep multiple copies of your files.
Infrant’s ReadyNAS NV (see Amazon) was released on February 1, 2006, and has many features that will keep your data safe. I recently purchased one because my old NAS failed on me and ironically enough, this NAS server was released on the same week.
FEATURES/PRO
RAID – Raid is a technology that provides redundancy through mirroring your data across multiple hard drives. The ReadyNAS NV through its own X-RAID technology has the ability to configure your server automatically based on how many hard drives is in the NAS. For those who may want to manually setup their RAID configuration (0/1/5), it allows you to do that too! To enable RAID, you will need to have more than 1 hard drive installed in your NAS.
Hot swappable hard drive – with this feature, you will be able to swap out any dead hard drive and insert a new one while the server is on. While turning your server off may not be an issue when used as a home server, it is a great feature for small businesses that may want an always-on file server. Hot swappable servers rarely come with an affordable price tag, so this is a real treat for sure. It’s design is soo user friendly that my grandma could pop in or switch out a hard drive with ease. It has 4 SATA hard drive bays and supports up to 2TB of space (500GB hard drives x4).
It supports Mozilla Firefox – Any device that can be configured through my favorite browser is a winner. This means that the ReadyNAS NV control panel will also work in just about any browser flavor of your choice. There’s a lot of features within the control panel such as checking for updates and updating your ReadyNAS NV right in the browser. The control panel can also be accessed via SSL so that you can safely connect to your server from work or school.
Recycle Bin – you can configure your share folders to automatically put files that were deleted into a separate folder called “Recycle Bin.” This is a great feature because deleting files that resides on the network does not go into Window’s recycle bin and is instead deleted forever. This “oops” folder can be emptied after ‘x’ many days of your choice.
Shh! Do you hear it? — the ReadyNAS NV is shipped with Seagate hard drives, which provides both reliability and quietness. In all of my experience, Seagate has the quietest hard drives around. It also has an internal 92mm cooling fan which is big enough to keep your hard drives cool and is remarkably quiet.
Cool design – this is by far the coolest looking server I’ve ever own. It’s very compact with the width of 4 hard drives stacked vertically and is no taller than most books.
THE EXTRAS Print Server – you can connect a USB (2.0) printer to this server and it will allow you to share the printer across the network.
Media Streaming Services – the ReadyNAS NV can connect to media centers like the D-Link DSM-320 (see Amazon), which has the ability to stream your video and music files over to the media center and onto to your TV. Cool, huh?
There are many other features that can be found through the ReadyNAS NV product brochure.
CON
Just with any new device you will need the time to set things up correctly and this NAS is no exception. I had problem connecting to the new server because I did not know the IP address of the server. There’s basically two ways to find this: (1) If you have a router that has DHCP configured you can log into the router and see what IP address was distributed to the ReadyNAS NV, or (2) you can install the setup utility program that comes with the server onto your computer which will help you locate the server on your network.
There’s no SSH/terminal ability, yet. As a network administrator, I like to have the ability to log into the server and manage my files through the command line. From the looks of it, it’s running a proprietary flavor of Linux or Unix (I could be wrong). There’s word that this feature will become available in future updates of the ReadyNAS NV operating system.
FINAL THOUGHTS
Of course, just having this server around will not prevent data loss. You still need to have off-site backups done once in a while in the event of a fire, theft, or natural disaster.
The ReadyNAS NV servers that is available for purchase through Amazon has different configurations. I chose to buy one with 1 hard drive (no RAID), since I figured I could probably find cheaper hard drives through Amazon or eBay. However, if you do not want to tinker with the installation of additional hard drives (which should be a breeze just based on the pictures I’ve provided), then buying one with 2, 3, or 4 hard drives should be available. I’ve been using the ReadyNAS NV server a few days now and haven’t had any problems other than what was described in the “con” section.
Recommended links: Infrant ReadyNas hacks
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Would you be willing to give me a quick update on your satisfaction level with the device now that you've been living with it for a while?
Thanks!
Paul
— Light & Dark · 29 November 2006, 08:22 · #
Thanks for the comments! I have to say that I'm loving it.
I currently have about 250GB of data saved onto my NV and haven't noticed performance problems. There have been about two firmware updates since they released the NV, which shows that they're pretty good in keeping their software up-to-update. The software is also smart in notifying me of any bad clusters on my hard disks, which is I really like since it indicates I could have a bad drive (note that I purchased by hard drives separately). I haven't had any drive failures, so I am unable to comment on that end.
Overall, the NV runs as I expected and do not have much to complain about. Infrant has a great community which I would highly recommend visiting.
Let me know if you have any further questions, thanks again for your comments!
— tek · 1 December 2006, 21:43 · #
— Mike · 23 August 2007, 09:51 · #
— Daniel · 7 September 2007, 22:40 · #
In short this product for a workgroup implimentation is only slightly less worse than the company Infrant that is behind it. After much research and talks with Infrant presales and tech support about my plans to impliment this as a File sharing devic with 10 users (light file sharing at that) I went ahead. The unit randomly lost files, locked up twice a week, had horrible transfer rates, often the unit would need to do a data cheque which required a reboot and a 2-7 hour start up (not fun in the middle of a work day). Every part of the unit, then the unit as a whole was swapped by infrant. So design flaw? Infrant would take days to weeks to reply to support calls. In the end might client is talking with their lawyer.
Highly not recommended for anything requiring security or multiple users. (for those saying it is not for multiple users Infrant told me it won’t support over a few hundred users in a workgroup, I had 10.
— Jason · 24 October 2007, 08:58 · #