Feeling nervous about storing all your digital media (music, movies, photos, home videos) on a single hard drive on your PC and lose it all if the hard drive crash one day? Maybe a home NAS (Network Area Storage) is the way to go. The Infrant Technologies ReadyNAS NV+ provides corporate like NAS features in your home. It offers a safe and effective way to store and serve your digital media files across your home network. It provides data redundancy (RAID 1 or 5), which means a hard drive can failed and your data won’t be lost. Of course it only provides hard drive redundancy, it can not restore files that you’ve accidentally deleted, you need a backup device for that. Although, you can use the ReadyNAS as your backup device. It comes with backup software which allows you to backup/restore your PCs across the network (5-license for Windows and Mac clients).
The advantage of a NAS is that you can upgrade the storage capacity seamlessly. It comes with 4 empty hot-swappable SATA slots. Which means you can upgrade your capacity from 750GB (4 x 300GB) to a 2.2TB (4 x 750GB) automatically by replacing your existing drive one by one.
ReadyNAS NV+ Highlights:
- Infrant NSP IT3107
- 4 lockable hot-swappable SATA disk trays
- Infrant Expandable X-RAID, RAID 0/1/5
- Programmable backup button
- One USB 2.0 port in front, two in back
- Compact portable design (8″H x 5″W x 9″D)
- LCD panel for instant status readout
- Server-rated power supply with noise-killer design for quieter operation
- Powerful 92mm cooling fan
- Low power consumption and power saving mode
- Compatible with Windows®, Mac, UNIX, and Linux systems
- Gigabit Ethernet with Jumbo frame support
- Simple setup wizard
- Integrated Backup Manager
- Compatible with leading network DVD players and UPnP AV streaming devices
- Multi-lingual browser-based setup
- Kensington lock compatible
- EMC® Retrospect® backup software for Windows (5-client license) included
- EMC® Retrospect® backup software for Macintosh (5-client license) included
Netgear RND4250 ReadyNAS NV+ 1 TB Desktop Network Storage (2x500GB)
Bazzer,
The Thecus N2100 is a nice product, but it only support RAID-1 for redundancy. RAID-5 is more efficient choice. If you’re adventurous, you can build yourself a Home NAS with RAID-5 and UPnP support. Openfiler (https://www.openfiler.com/) supports UPnP. I think FreeNAS (http://www.freenas.org/) have UPnP in its feature scope.
Now that the Data Robotics folks have introduced a NAS front end for the Drobo, it is very competitive with the ReadyNAS and the price is fairly equivalent. With the additional functionality of the Drobo, it’s clearly a winner product.
The DROBO is nice, but the transfer performance is 1/2 to 1/3 the speed of the ReadyNAS on a Gigabit Network.
The Drobo has improved its performance a good deal from what I have read lately on their community. THey have a new firmware revision available in the hacker section. But I can’t speak to their network performance through DroboShare, I haven’t seen any performance numbers published. Where did you get the 1/2 – 1/3 figures? Could you publish a link? I know their USB numbers were better than Infrant’s network performance, but I don’t have info on DroboShare.
If anybody has seen published performance numbers for DroboShare, please link or share with us please.