Infrant Technologies’ ReadyNAS NV: Enterprise Features, Desktop Footprint
by Purav Sanghani on March 17, 2006 11:42 AM EST- Posted in
- Storage
Introduction
We have been looking at external storage devices that can connect directly to PCs or file servers by way of USB and FireWire interfaces. This has wowed many desktop users who need very little when it comes to configurability. However, those external hard drive storage devices have their limitations and are not ideal solutions for those who want to manage shares and provide security in the home or small business. The part that most concerns us is that those products also do not offer any type of data protection or redundancy to reduce the risk of data loss due to disk failure.
Infrant Technologies is one of many companies who has taken this into account. They have combined the portability and simplicity of a desktop external storage device and the data redundancy and user security features of an enterprise network attached storage device into an extremely small form factor package called the ReadyNAS.
A few months back, Infrant sent us their 1TB ReadyNAS X6, which featured a custom operating system, RAIDiator, and their patented X-RAID technology, which allowed them to bring the redundancy features of enterprise class servers to the desktop. Since then, they have also released an updated version of the ReadyNAS 600 and X6 models, named the ReadyNAS NV. Take a look at the differences between each model at Infrant’s website.
We have been looking at external storage devices that can connect directly to PCs or file servers by way of USB and FireWire interfaces. This has wowed many desktop users who need very little when it comes to configurability. However, those external hard drive storage devices have their limitations and are not ideal solutions for those who want to manage shares and provide security in the home or small business. The part that most concerns us is that those products also do not offer any type of data protection or redundancy to reduce the risk of data loss due to disk failure.
Infrant Technologies is one of many companies who has taken this into account. They have combined the portability and simplicity of a desktop external storage device and the data redundancy and user security features of an enterprise network attached storage device into an extremely small form factor package called the ReadyNAS.
A few months back, Infrant sent us their 1TB ReadyNAS X6, which featured a custom operating system, RAIDiator, and their patented X-RAID technology, which allowed them to bring the redundancy features of enterprise class servers to the desktop. Since then, they have also released an updated version of the ReadyNAS 600 and X6 models, named the ReadyNAS NV. Take a look at the differences between each model at Infrant’s website.
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MikeRocker - Friday, March 17, 2006 - link
Sorry, couldn't resist the joke. ;-) Maybe 'perforated' is a more accurate description.Nice piece of kit, though it gets owned by the RAID performance-wise. How much is that actually down to the network interface? Pity its so expensive too.
brownba - Friday, March 17, 2006 - link
ehhh, looks like a space heater to melatrosicarius - Monday, March 20, 2006 - link
I bought one about a month ago. It's good b/c it has RAID-5 on a Gigabit connection. It's small and looks awesome, but the fan is loud as s***. It's basically a micro Linux box.Anyway, I use it as a BACKUP only, b/c it doesn't have a "real" CPU or Mobo and is a tad slow to work from directly. For my Server, I use a real PC with four identical slave drives, also in RAID-5, so the backup can be 1:1. I wish it had RAID-6 b/c my Arcea 1210 RAID controller card in my server has the possibility of RAID-6.
Just FYI, four 300GB Maxtor MaxLineIII 7200RPM SATA drives do work great, even tho they are not listed on the Infrant HW compatability page. It will give you a 1.2TB array (1200GB) of total space if you stripe the 4 drives (RAID-0), and Will give you around 850GB if you use RAID-5 (one quarter of each drive is reserved to cache a third of each other drive so one drive can fail without any data loss.)