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I got an Infrant ReadyNAS NV , before the company was bought up by NetGear. It's pretty awesome, though not perfect. Real hot-swappable RAID, dynamic reconfiguration, and lots of other good management tools. Looks pretty sweet, fairly quiet. Using it as a print server has always been problematic, tho.

Also, they seem to have gone up in price *quite* a bit. This site says the no-disk one is $1049. I think mine was around $600. I got one with no disks, and found a good deal on two 500GB disks (which were on their approved h/w list) and still ended up under $1200, and that was two or three years ago. But mine didn't have gigabit ethernet. I guess that explains some of the cost increase.

I set mine up with 500GB of storage, mirrored, and two open bays. I started offloading pix and video and backing up everything else, and a couple years later have not yet had to fill the other bays. But I like knowing I can expand to 1.5TB in RAID5 when I need the space.

Firmware update shouldn't be too bad on you. It requires only a few minutes of downtime during two reboots. The brand new 4.0 firmware is pretty nice and has improved performance quite a bit. Also, you can upgrade the box from 256MB to 1GB to give it a performance boost.

I'm using X-RAID with 4 x 750GB. I haven't tried it with any other RAID levels, so I can't make a comparison.

If you don't frequent it already, go check out Infrant's support forum at http://www.infrant.com/forum/ . You'll find their technical guys to be very involved and helpful, and they love to geek out with clued users. Good luck!

Well, maybe introduced as new models bundled with bigger drives, but haven't these been around for a bit even before NetGear bought out Infrant Technologies? http://infrant.com/products/products.php

During the resync of the first drive, I had not idea to resync before I pulled the first drive out.
I had a copy of some things, mostly digital picture album stuff (thank god for that huh, no one wants to lose that)
But lost years of very rare hard to find musioc videos, and things that were just way to much space to have a copy of.
I have a copy of more things now, but even now, I can not have a full backup fo a 2TB NAS, I was lucky to have the 2TB NAS at all I guess.
Me and a buddy has thought about if he gets one, doing a resync between us, for atleast smaller size directories of things.
If I would have know the problem I was going to have, was going to happen, I probably would have immediately put back the first disk when the NAS locked up on the first rsync. Something I did might have made it worse, but I did think about what I was doing when I did it, and to me at the time seemed like the right thing to do.
The error I got during the resync was "Aiee, killing interrupt handler" in the front of the unit, and it seemed locked up to me, even the reboot button on the front did not work, I had to pull the plug.
Here are others that have had same error message anyway.
http://www.infrant.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=9542
This to me was the root of the issue, sine if it would have just went well, and I would have never seen that message, I do not think I would have had any issues, but still the support person seems to think somehow it wass my fault, even though to me something went wrong when that error appeared in the first place.

I bought a Infrant ReadyNAS before they were bought by Netgear from NewEgg, without disks for around 650$
http://www.infrant.com/products/products_details.php?name=ReadyNAS%20NVPlus
I used to think this thing was awsome, that was until I had a issue with it and lost all my data not long ago.
I had 3 500GB disks running thier own XRAID configuration, similiar to Raid5 but allows patitions to be resized whne you grow all disks to bigger sizes.
I was planning on changing all 3 disk to 750GB disks and adding a 4th 750GB disk.
When I pulled the first drive out and replaced the new 750GB disk it started to rebuild the new disk and after some time locked up. giving me a error of some kind of process panic on the front screen.
After I rebooted the thing it then told me the new disk was dead, so I swapped it with another of the new disks I had thinking that all the information to rebuild that new disk was on the 2 untouched drives still.
After that the thing was acting very strange and would never show the volume info right and after calling Netger and waiting almost 3 weeks for them to tell me if they could get my data back, since they can SSH in to the box, but do not allow ssh for customers in to the machine BTW, they told me all data was lost.
I had lost hundreds of GB's of pictures and videos it really sucks to lose all your data when you go through so much to protect it.
you can read more about my expeience on thier forums here
http://www.infrant.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=13312

I redid the whole NAS and now it is just over 2TB in size, and works ok, sometimes very slow, but seems very stable unless you have a real issue like above.

I bought a Infrant ReadyNAS before they were bought by Netgear from NewEgg, without disks for around 650$
http://www.infrant.com/products/products_details.php?name=ReadyNAS%20NVPlus
I used to think this thing was awsome, that was until I had a issue with it and lost all my data not long ago.
I had 3 500GB disks running thier own XRAID configuration, similiar to Raid5 but allows patitions to be resized whne you grow all disks to bigger sizes.
I was planning on changing all 3 disk to 750GB disks and adding a 4th 750GB disk.
When I pulled the first drive out and replaced the new 750GB disk it started to rebuild the new disk and after some time locked up. giving me a error of some kind of process panic on the front screen.
After I rebooted the thing it then told me the new disk was dead, so I swapped it with another of the new disks I had thinking that all the information to rebuild that new disk was on the 2 untouched drives still.
After that the thing was acting very strange and would never show the volume info right and after calling Netger and waiting almost 3 weeks for them to tell me if they could get my data back, since they can SSH in to the box, but do not allow ssh for customers in to the machine BTW, they told me all data was lost.
I had lost hundreds of GB's of pictures and videos it really sucks to lose all your data when you go through so much to protect it.
you can read more about my expeience on thier forums here
http://www.infrant.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=13312

I redid the whole NAS and now it is just over 2TB in size, and works ok, sometimes very slow, but seems very stable unless you have a real issue like above.

Infrant (wow, just checked their website and it looks like they were bought by NetGear) created their own version of RAID that specifically addresses the issue of capacity and expansion. It's a nice transitional blend from RAID-1 to RAID-5 and does offer the ability to increase the total capacity (albeit with a lot of drive swapping).

Buy an Infrant RAID with the two biggest drives you can afford. Let's say two 750GB drives or whatever's on sale that week. It starts out acting as RAID-1 with the drives mirroring. So you have 750GB of "safe" storage. Now you add another 750GB drive. Okay, now you have 1500GB of storage with one of the drives acting as parity drive (RAID-5). Add a fourth drive and how you have 2250GB of "safe" storage. Now you come back and just replace one of the original 750GB drives witha 1TB drive. Do you get extra capacity? No...not initially. But the drive is fully formatted and integrated as X-RAID. What this means is that eventually after you have piecemeal or onesie-twosie upgraded all four drives, suddenly the X-RAID resizes itself to match the capacity of the new drives with no transfer or downtime. So in theory if you wanted to upgrade your RAID, buy four 1TB drives, swap them out one at a time (letting each one rebuilt the array) and then at the end you'll have 3TB RAID isntead of the old 2250GB RAID and all the data intact.

http://www.infrant.com/products/products_details.p hp?name=About%20X-RAID

I have three ReadyNAS units and love them to death. They are a little fussy about drive temperatures (I guess that's a good things but, I may get like 40 emails during the course of the day about it and it's not like I'll drive home from work to turn up the A/C in my house). My only sadness is that Infrant doesn't have a higher capacity unit than four drives (oh please oh please, eight drives with a RAID-6 type protective hotspare in one nice rack-mountable unit would be my ultimate dream).

-JoeShmoe
.

You could always purchase a NAS from Infrant. A diskless version retails for around $640; and they have a proprietary raid level called X-RAID. It is basically a RAID 5 array, but allows for expansion using larger drives. The standard rule applies, each individual drive will be limited to the size of the smallest drive, but you can hotswap one drive at a time, allow the drive to be rebuilt, and repeat the process for all four drives. Once the final one is done, it will auto expand to your new capacity. Pretty futureproof.

Or, you could just buy this off ebay with 3TB of storage for under $2000. Radiator OS is linux based... http://www.infrant.com/products/products_details.p hp?name=ReadyNAS%20NVPlus

It seems to me there's undo fascination with external drives. Yes people should do backups, and yes this is a gadget to easily get them there... but they're slower than internal drives and sometimes proprietary (how do you get at your data if the box dies?).

I can see using an external USB drive for backup if you intend to take it somewhere, often. If you leave it in house and have multiple PCs, use a consumer NAS solution (e.g., Buffalo, Infrant, D-Link). Otherwise, the best solution is to buy an internal drive and get backup software that you can schedule to run nightly (e.g., rsync). It's much cheaper, faster, more flexible from both a hardware and software perspective, and it sits safely in your case.. quiet, no blinking lights, and the cat can't knock it over.

I have been bitten by every single problem mentioned in that article. Bad OEM "revogery disks" and MS licensing restrictions that prevent one from using an alternative install disks are one of the biggest single problems facing those of us that support very small businesses professionally. Say what you want about Dell... at least they include real windows install disks.

However, I have to question the judgement of the author. First of all, what kind of consultant deploys branch offices "weekly" and didn't know about these problems in advance? Anyone with much experience would know about (a) how difficult it is to move windows from one storage subsystem to another, (b) that HP uses bad recovery disks, and (c) that RAID installs require a floppy.

In addition, I question the use of Linux in this situation... perhaps it was his only way out of a bad recommendation to a client, but the problem is that there are *very* few Linux-savv consultants servicing businesses this size. For this reason alone I don't deploy Linux solutions... I can't find subcontractors who can back me up when I'm on vacation or sick, and should I stop working with a client, I don't want to leave them high and dry. Most consultants I know replace Linux servers with windows because they simply can't support it.

Finally, there's a much better way to do what he's trying to do: a NAS appliance. If all you need is some shared storage, printer sharing and the occasional backup, one of the many small business NAS devices out there (Infrant, Snap / Adaptec, Buffalo, etc...) will do so with greater reliability and less complexity than a PC-based server.

-R

Actually, infrant's readynas now does support drive sleep mode.
A new (stable release) firmware was released a week or so ago

http://www.infrant.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=5529

Another one that I like is Infrant's ReadyNAS. There are several different forms factors - I've really liked the 4-SATA bay ReadyNAS NV, it's a solid piece of hardware (and runs their embedded version of Linux, has web-based configuration of everything including its Samba, servers as a printserver, supports external USB drives for backup, etc).

They have a default hybrid RAID 5 option that automatically grows volumes incrementally until the disks are full - and in order to grow the volumes you just slide in another drive without any configuration (the first drive becomes parity, and then further ones expand the space).

The only two gripes I have with the unit are related: they incorrectly portray SMB/CIFS as being the default network file system for MAC OS X (as opposed to AFP, which they say is only for Mac OS 9 and before), and they do not let you turn off SMB/CIFS.

Another one that I like is Infrant's ReadyNAS. There are several different forms factors - I've really liked the 4-SATA bay ReadyNAS NV, it's a solid piece of hardware (and runs their embedded version of Linux, has web-based configuration of everything including its Samba, servers as a printserver, supports external USB drives for backup, etc).

They have a default hybrid RAID 5 option that automatically grows volumes incrementally until the disks are full - and in order to grow the volumes you just slide in another drive without any configuration (the first drive becomes parity, and then further ones expand the space).

The only two gripes I have with the unit are related: they incorrectly portray SMB/CIFS as being the default network file system for MAC OS X (as opposed to AFP, which they say is only for Mac OS 9 and before), and they do not let you turn off SMB/CIFS.

I've thrice previously posted on Slashdot regarding my MythTV experiences. This comment should be read in context. (The main changes are that 0.19 has indeed fixed the OSD and the skipping-tuner issues. Everything else, both good and bad, I mentioned still hold true today. I *think* the newest KnoppMyth release actually now supports SATA drives, although I'll bet USB keyboards and mice are still considered suspect. I still disagree with the Pavlovian suggestion of MythTV--as we've once again seen in this thread--without appropriate caveats to anyone asking for an easy-to-use MythTV setup.)

Since the most-recent posting focused on the negative, I'll focus on the positive today. Thanks to MythTV and about $1100 in parts (not including $2150 for a 2TB NAS), I have a more-or-less reliable, elegant-looking (both hardware- and interfacewise) video recorder that:

* Simultaneously records from two cable boxes and one over-the-air tuner card, all in HDTV.
* Gives me easy access to my recorded programs in alphabetic and record-date form, with multiple sort and grouping options (all the "How I Met Your Mother" episodes get grouped under that heading, for example), and due to a well-designed MySQL backend, no slowdowns no matter how big my library gets. (Any TiVo owner knows just how stupendously slow their boxes can get with a few hundred hours' worth of storage.)
* Gives me easy access to my AVI library in nicely-organized form based on the directory tree.
* Premarks programs recorded on non commercial-free channels with appropriate cues so that I can manually (or automatically) skip whole ad blocks with one button. (Tip: For North American viewers, "Logo Detection" alone is probably the best choice for commercial detection. It's faster and has fewer false positives than "All.")

My job requires long hours. I often fall asleep exhausted on the sofa soon after arriving home while trying to relax by watching the TV. But when I'm awake, it's nice to know that at any time I have about 200 programs or about 340 hours' worth of Hollywood movies, dramas, and comedies, almost all in HD, to enjoy. That's worth the money and setup time in my book.

I've been trying to get this company to release their sources for about a year now: Infrant. They make a middling network storage appliance. I'd like to poke around in there to see why their performance is so bad. I've tried contacting GNU, but there doesn't seem to be a good point of contact for GPL violations (I sent a message to the email addresses they publish, but they seem to go unserviced). Infrant claims I'm the only one asking for source, even though I know that not to be the truth. Note that they are hostile towards anyone who asks about this in their forums and downright abusive in email on the topic.

This doesn't work right?

** For GPL license information and source code availability, please refer to the CD-ROM included with your Infrant Product.

Found on this page http://www.infrant.com/learn_features.htm

The ratings and reviews on their homepage http://www.infrant.com/ say it all. This thing blows a Terastation away in terms of ease of use, supported protocols, and goodies. Buy an empty ReadyNAS X6 from http://www.eaegis.com/ for $579 (no tax, free shipping). Fill it with two of whatever drive is dirt cheap this week (cough-newegg-cough). Here's the kicker...ReadyNAS will expand the drive array automatically each time you add a drive. So buy a couple 300GB's for $100 each and you'll have 300GB of mirrored storage. A few months from now, you run out of room, you just drop in another 300GB drive and now you've got 600GB of redundant storage. Add another drive and you'll have 900GB with redundancy. Still need more room? Replace those 300GB drives one at a time with higher capacity drives and watch it automatically resize the set to use the extra space. Without ever having to rebuld the array! Trying to backup a TB of data so you can move your NAS from 300GB drives to something higher really sucks the big one.

Of course it does CIFS(SMB). But it is one of the only NAS products to support Apple File Protocol, which is a must for networks with Mac/OS X users that insist on using filenames with colons, slashes and question marks and other things that make CIFS/SMB explode. It also supports NFS and rsync for the UNIX/Linux crowd and both FTP and HTTP for the web browser crowd (hi, grandma). It also streams in both flavors of home media server protocols (UPnP and the HMS) so you can buy a $100 Linksys media extender and watch anything you have stored on your RAID. It also has a SlimServer plugin for streaming music to those SlimServer devices that you can hook up to your stereo or a cheap pair of speakers.

It's also supports Gigabit with Jumbo Packets (write only currently) so you can copy 200GB of HD camera footage to the NAS in a couple hours instead of a couple days. The RevB case is cable-less with just thumbscrews between you and swapping a drive. It also holds the drives vertically because who is the idiot who thinks stacking heat factories horizontally on top of each other is a good idea. Also, I can't tell you how many RAID products only lets you specify an alert SMTP server name but no authentication information, which means e-mail alerts don't get delivered (boo Promise, boo 3Ware). ReadyNAS has its own MTA so the mail gets through without a problem, and it can also let you set login/password to authenticate to your ISP's SMTP server. It looks nice, clean, and it certainly not the noisiest thing I've had in my room, although I will be happy when future firmware lets you put the drives to sleep so the case fan can be completely turned off when you aren't using it.

I spend three weeks shopping for a NAS for my network, and I'm glad I looked past everyone telling me Terastation. I've had this ReadyNAS X6 for a few weeks now and I love it. I'm already shopping for a second so I can recycle the old drives from all my other rag-tag household systems into one nice neat package.

-JoeShmoe

For backups I run some nice Plan 9 magic - the Venti archiving file server. No-hastle incremental backups, snapshots of previous days, identical-block compression, and so on. It's been ported to Unix (and so runs on my Mac), and provides more peace of mind (coupled with the raid) about my data than I thought possible.

We just got a couple Buffalo TeraStation units at work. The software that comes on the CD is a peice of junk, but the unit itself seems good. The major drawback I've heard about it is that it's really slow in RAID5 mode. Not too big a deal for us, as it's a cache sitting in front of tape, so it's still a faster backup medium. It's obviously running Samba in the background, but it doesn't support NFS mounts. I don't know if that's a big deal for you or not.

The other company I've heard about is Infrant. Similar setup to Buffalo, only instead of being mistaken for a Bose subwoofer, it looks like a small radio circa 1920. It claims an impressive set of awards, but I don't know if it's any faster in the RAID5 department than Buffalo.

But, for home backups that are occurring overnight, and if you're not pushing 100+GB at a time, you're probably good with either. They're both, depending on capacity, between $800-$1,500.

ReadyNAS is reported to be a better choice than Buffalo. There is a Tom's Networking review on ReadyNAS 600 that compares the two fairly well. It costs a bit more (~1100) for the same amount of storage, but it's worth it if the quality is that much better. Also, I've been told you can have two of them where one remotely backs-up the other . . . which allows for disaster recovery where the physical location of the original is destroyed.

ReadyNas X6 is very nice. It has support for upto 4 SATA drives and can grow the raid array if you want to only start with 2 drives. I would recommend this with the SATA 400GB western digital raid drives.

I own the X6 and love it.

- It's GBE is very fast.
- It supports raid-5 with up to 4 drives. (mirroring on 2 drives)
- You can just keep adding bigger drives. so it'll be highly expandable down the road.
- Supports SMB, NFS, FTP, etc.

It's $600 for the unit with no drives.

Check out the toms networking review, it's linked from Infrants site.

First off, who wrote this review? Sounds to me like an Anthology Solutions employee trying to be all slashdotty.

I just looked at the specs for this and am not that impressed. Like many other NAS devices, they claim OS/X support, but support is not via AFP. Though their docs make no mention of it, the YellowMachine is almost certainly running SAMBA only, and OS/X support is also through SAMBA. The problem with this is primarily long filenames. Try backing up your music collection to a SMB/CIFS box, and you'll see what I mean. IMHO, if you don't have AFP support, then you don't support Macs.

Similarly, there's no support for rsync or (given what Tom's Networking has to say) file access via FTP or HTTP. And this may be just me, but who wants a router, DHCP server, a firewall, and a proxy server embedded in a NAS box? And $1300? That's cheap?

I recently purchased a RAID enabled SOHO NAS appliance. I spent a long time figuring out exactly what was needed in a mixed OS/X, Windows, Linux environment. I picked the Infrant ReadyNAS box. You can see my blog entry on this subject for details as to why. In short: support for SMB/CIFS, AFP, NFS, rsync, webdav, and FTP. Support for UPS devices. Support for Gigabit Ethernet. Very good documentation and an even better (employee active) user forum. And I got a TB of storage (650MB after RAID 5 formatting) for $1,000.

If you don't want/have time to tinker it yourself, you should consider one of the infrant readynas models. It's very easy to setup, reliable and has a lot of interesting features.

http://www.infrant.com/products_ReadyNAS600.htm

Instead I started with Buffalo's TeraStations which are affordable and have built-in RAID support.

While the Buffalo product isn't bad, it's really not industrial strength, either.

Check out Infrant's ReadyNAS servers as an alternative (http://infrant.com/) - lots of really nice features (including NFS support, if you want/need it, unlike Buffalo), much better performance, and a rack-mount option, if you're into that kinky rack thing...

Seriously, if you're looking for a killer low-cost, high-performance NAS server appliance, check it out. I haven't found anything that better balances cost and performance, although let me say I've not yet seen one in action up close, so I can't offer a real recommendation just yet.

I have one as well and it does kick ass. And I think the price is very competitive against something you would build yourself. Newegg has the 1TB (4 x 250GB) version for just over $1100. My friend is building his own, it'll probably cost about the same, but have more capacity. However his won't be hardware RAID, the software integration won't be there, and it won't look as cool.

And it's funny you compare it to "having you own linux box" because the ReadyNAS is Linux based. Except they are too busy to release the pertinent code, using the "you want new features or us to spend time prepping the code" excuse. I don't know how much benefit there would be to opening the code, I'm sure the web interface and the drivers are proprietary, which probably wouldn't leave much more than a stripped down Sarge distro.

It's too bad, they have such good customer service otherwise. I guess it depends on how much of an Open Source idealist you are, whether or not to support a company with a good product and good customer service but is slacking on GPL compliance.

Here's the relevant thread in their own forums: http://www.infrant.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=411&s tart=0&postdays=0&postorder=asc&highlight=

This thing, from http://www.infrant.com/, can be had for around $600 US without drives, which is not much more than it would cost to build your own. It lets you start with two mirrored drives in RAID 1, then add another drive or two, and it transparently migrates to RAID 5. Pretty cool.

Note I have no financial interest in Infrant, I just want their products. :)

I picked up one of these: ReadyNAS 600.

I built it with 4 x 300GB in Raid 5. Even with 400GB drives it would have cost almost $1000 cheaper. And it has gigabit ethernet, SMB/NFS/AppleTalk/FTP connections. Also Wireless and Print Server ready. Far more then a USB only device which costs a lot more.