Infrant ReadyNAS NV+

In recent years, USB drives have gained popularity as storage needs have grown. I had a 230 gigabyte drive until perhaps a year or so ago, at which point I outgrew it. Yes, I really do store more than 230 gigabytes, but that’s not what this is about. I’ll talk about that another time. When I did, I bought two 500 gigabyte drives. Those were nearing capacity. Not completely full, mind you, but close enough that I was needing to think about getting something that could hold more. Enter the Infrant ReadyNAS line of products.

They actually come in a number of flavors, which means I had to decide which one I wanted. The ReadyNAS 1000 models are rack mounts, which are nice in that application, but I don’t have a rack at home, so I dropped them. The 600 and X6 don’t appear to support hot-swappable drives, so I skipped them. This left the NV and the NV+. These two are similar, but the NV+ includes an LCD display and EMC Retrospect backup software. But more importantly, you can’t seem to buy the NV without disks (an important distinction). The NV+ it is!

I had already decided that I wanted to load the device with four Seagate Barracuda 750GB drives. At first, you’ll say that this is 3 terabytes, and you’d be correct in that assumption. But using Infrant’s X-RAID technology, it actually sets aside one drive for redundancy, and taking that and formatting away, it’s actually closer to 2 terabytes of usable storage. Still a twofold improvement over my two 500 gigabyte drives (plus it would be redundant. I think we have a winner.

If you purchase the NV+ preloaded with these four drives, you’ll pay somewhere around $2999. But if you buy the unit bare (no drives installed), you’ll pay $799 for the unit and about $340 each for the drives (from Newegg.com, the best price I could find when buying). That works out to about $2160, a savings of nearly $800. The only downside is that you’ll have to give it time to format all of those drives, which can take a while. But for $800, it may be worth it. It was for me, since all you have to do is mount the drives, slide the tray in and wait. The unit does the rest.

The ReadyNAS comes from Infrant ready to use. Simply plug it in and go. The only thing you need to change is if you want to use a RAID setting other than their X-RAID (and I’m not sure why you would). X-RAID is an expandable RAID, so if someone introduces 1 terabyte hard drives, you can replace those 750 gigabyte ones later and you’ve got a larger storage unit – without losing data (it will take some time to rebuild, and you’ve got to do it one at a time, but hey, it’s better than trying to save off all that data to tape or something). You can set an IP address, or you can use DHCP (the default) or you can even use the DHCP server in the unit.

I haven’t quite decided if I like the email alert feature built-in to the unit just yet. On one hand, it’s nice. On the other hand, it can email you an awful lot during the initial setup. Now that things are running it seems to have calmed down, and it will be nice to see if it works as well as advertised.

Also built in is a SlimServer streaming server which will even support your Squeezebox from Slim Devices. I don’t have one, so I can’t try it out, but that’s sweet.

I have yet to have a chance to try out the EMC software that’s bundled with the unit, as I just copy data over to the drive as needed right now. I suspect there are other things that can be done that I have yet to find. For instance, you can enable and disable individual protocols, like FTP, HTTP and even RSYNC. Frankly, I’m digging it. This is one of the coolest devices I’ve had in my hot little hands for some time. If you need the storage and have the resources, I’d definitely recommend checking it out.