Infrant ReadyNAS+ Goodness
Following up from a previous post, I went ahead and ordered an Infrant ReadyNAS+. This is a Network Attached Storage device that sits on your network and acts purely as a fileserver (well, this box can do a bunch of other stuff too, like stream audio to other network audio devices as well as iTunes clients).
I ordered the box empty of drives (but with 1GB of RAM), and ordered four 750GB enterprise class Seagate Barracuda drives from NewEgg. The drives arrived earlier this week, and this afternoon I picked up the Infrant box from the local FedEx depot.
Late this evening was setup time.
First impressions are wow! It is incredibly small - just big enough to house the drives and as solid as a rock. The build quality reminds me of the PowerMac.
Setup was extremely easy. I just followed the instructions and installed the drives, connected it to the network and then booted it. By the way, like all good hardware manufacturers, Infrant not only included all the mounting screws needed for four drives, but also included extras.
The unit comes with some software for PC, Mac and Linux, but you don’t really need it. If you know the IP address of the box you can just navigate to http://[host]/admin in any browser to configure it. Before booting the unit I had added the box to my local DHCP and BIND servers as, handily, the MAC address for the unit is printed on the bottom. Anyhow, the IP address, however obtained, is displayed on to LCD at the front of the unit, so you can just use that.
The box supports domain membership, so I just joined it to my home domain, setup some shares and that was it. By default it creates a user share for each user in the domain which is nice. It supports sharing by CIFS, NFS, AFP, FTP, HTTP, HTTPS and RSYNC, and also supports discovery via Bonjour.
Oh, did I say home domain? Yup, I out geeked my self last weekend and setup a Windows domain in my house as there are now too many machines and running without “single sign-on” was becoming a pain. Did I mention that my Primary Domain Controller is Debian Linux running on a PowerMac G5? More on that in a later post…
Anyhow, the Infrant NAS provides a whole heap of other good features, but lets just say that the best one is that I now have a RAID 5 box on my network with over two terabytes of free space.
And that’s the best feature by far…
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I just got the ReadyNAS+ with 4 x 256GB disks and indeed setting up was a snap. The box is SMALL!! and looks really cool.
How noisy is that NAS? Do you have it in your office or a machine room?
Steve -
Great article. I tried to trackback to this, but it appeared not to work correctly. Here's an article I just wrote about Windows Home Server where I compare to Infrant - your article is listed at the end.
http://www.appdev.info/?q=node/73
Justin: As we discussed over email - it's not that noisy at all. And apologies for the delay in replying!
Question for you Seattle Neighbor!
I just bought one of these and it isn't here yet. I don't run static IP or a domain controller and I want to move all of my media to the NAS and have that media accessable from several machines. Comcrap does a great job of hanging on an IP address once or twice a week which forces me to reboot the modem thus changing all of the router assigned IP addresses.
How do I maintain the relationhsip between machines without having to track down the new IP addresses every time I reboot?
Thx in advance!
Hi Steve,
I came across your (great) blog since I've been doing a lot of research on a NAS for my business (mostly) Mac Consulting and one of my clients (small 3 man all Mac graphics company). I see it's been a few months since you've had the Readynas+ running and I wanted to ask how's it going? From all the reader groups I see the only concerns lingering in my head are: 1) Speed 2) File name compatibility. What are you typically getting on a transfer (I assume you're all Gigabit) and any issues on Mac filename issues? Have any other popped up since.
Thanks for your thoughts. I enjoy the blog.
Best,
Brian
Can you explain how I will backup that 2TB of info using USB 2.0 ?