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Add A Terabyte or Three With Infrant ReadyNAS 4-Drive SATA NAS
Home/Office Network Device Can Also Stream Media Directly
by Daniel P. Dern ([email protected])
Vendor: Infrant Technologies Product Names: ReadyNAS NV+, 1000S ($649/$849 diskless,
$2,999 with 4 750GB SATA drives)
Repertoire Media Server ($3,999 and $4,999)
Availability: Now Product URL: http://infrant.com/products/products.php
Infrant Technologies’ trio of four-bay ReadyNASs, demoed at the recent Ziff-Davis Digital Life Expo in New York City, targets these anyone enough data and/or needs to go beyond just an external hard drive or a two-drive NAS, ranging from consumers wanting to stream media files without needing a computer on, to digital-intensive professionals, SOHOs and even SMBs who want one-box RAID storage of up to 1.5TB capacity.
The ReadyNAS NV+ desktop and the ReadyNAS 1000s 1u rackmount are available either fully-populated with four 750GB SATA drives, or diskless — you can start with two or even one drive, and hotswap add/upgrade as your needs and budget permit — simply pop open the door and slide them in, no cabling needed, thankfully!
The fanlessRepertoire Digital Media Server comes with 500GB or 750GB Seagate low-noise drives, quiet enough for your living room.
Infrant supports RAID 0, 1 and 5, and their proprietary X-RAID.
Gigabit Ethernet and UPnP support make ReadyNASs suitable for pushing High-Def and other media content directly to digital media adapters, and SlimServer devices like Logitech’s Squeezebox
(http://www.slimdevices.com/pi_squeezebox.html) and Transporter, which push digital audio to a stereo. And you can add external USB storage (though it won’t be RAIDed).
The boxes have remarkably low power
consumption for a four-drive device — less than 65 watts, about
half to a third of an Intel/AMD-based NAS, according to Infrant — and commensurately low heat, making the rackmount version a low-impact
addition to your computer room. For further power/cooling savings, drives spin down when not in use, and the device can be set for auto-shutdown/powerup.
Setting up the ReadyNAS is easy (you’ll need a browser with JavaScript), but configuring your computer firewall, sharing, etc. to see the network drive
may take experience beyond the casual home/home-office neophyte — or a call to tech support. (E.g., you need to tell XP to “mount” the network drive — trivial only after you’ve done it at least once.) Also, the admin program tends to hang all too easily,
forcing system reboots — and Infrant seems to think you can’t/shouldn’t run a firewall like ZoneAlarm on the PC.