For the first time in my life, I have spent more money on a backup device then I spent on computers. It was a necessity for our family having all those digital pictures, videos, CDs and DVDs and personal data piling up for about 10 years of history that we own.
After having trouble with NetGear's SC101, I have decided to buy something solid and contributed about 2000AU$ on the way. I have read a lot about NAS devices on TomsHardware.com and other forums and decided to buy a ReadyNasNV+ with a 750Gb Seagate Barracuda hard disk. I bought it from Technology Warehouse in Mitchell as they are the only supplier in Canberra. It is distributed by www.primedigitalsystem.com.au in Australia.
This device has got 4 hot swappable SATA hard disk trays with a Raid0-5 and XRaid™ capability. You can have 3Tb maximum so starting with one 750Gb hard disk makes sense.
The box came with an American power cable which is a shame but it was easy to pull a power cable from my tool box to replace it. On the CD it comes with EMC Retrospect Professional™ for Mac and Windows (5 client license for Windows) for backup purposes. There is a network cable, hard disk screws and an installation manual in the box as well.
The installation and creating the partitions took about 20min in total and I was ready to copy some of my files in about half an hour after setting up the device and creating the users and shares. As I am using Windows 2003 Server on my laptop, EMC Retrospect needs to be upgraded to Single Server version but you don't have to use EMC to backup your data.
By default, ReadyNas uses XRaid™ technology to setup hard disks. I let it go and got back 666Gb out of a 750Gb hard disk. (wohooo that is an evil number). I gave 100gb to my wife, 100gb to myself and rest is media and backups.
You can also attach printers, USB keys, a UPS or an external USB hard drive to backup the content of ReadyNasNV+.
ReadyNasNV+ also works as media streamer on your network and works with leading Network DVD players and SqueezeBox™ players. As I have put in just one hard disk, the temperature doesn't raise a lot and the fan behind doesn't work much. This is good noise wise at the moment.
E-mail notification is also a feature of this device and alerts you when there is an event happening which you want to know like failures, updates, UPS behavior etc.
Some of the features of the device:
- 4 hot swappable trays with hardware RAID
- System monitoring with e-mail alerts
- Integrated backup manager
- Multiple HD content streams
- UPnP and AV support for media adapters
- Easy scaling from 1 to 4 hard disks with X-Raid technology
- Low power consumption
- LCD status panel (invisible when it is turned off)
- Auto updates its firmware
- 1 year warranty
- Acessible from Linux, Windows and Mac
Now next step is to create a modified boot CD downloaded from www.sysresccd.org and as explained at www.linux-magazine.com/Magazine/Downloads/73/Perl to backup entire HD on to ReadyNasNV+.
The only thing which is missing on the device is a Subversion repository which I believe possible to install by hacking the device a bit. I think company will do something about this in the future by giving SSH acess to the box. I wouldn't touch to any screw on it before the warranty goes out.