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.
13 Comments
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Iozone - Thursday, May 11, 2006 - link
There is a bad link in the article:http://images.anandtech.com/reviews/storage/infant...">http://images.anandtech.com/reviews/storage/infant...
File does not exist ...
Any chance of getting the link fixed ?
dunnp - Saturday, March 18, 2006 - link
So since the RAID performance was so good, what was the setup for the RAID?byvis - Saturday, March 18, 2006 - link
...s939 has DDR2? :-)RAM: 1GB Corsair XMS4400 DDR2 (2x512MB)
WileCoyote - Friday, March 17, 2006 - link
What brand/model Raid 5 controller was used with the Seagate drives?randomlinh - Friday, March 17, 2006 - link
could you imagine backing up that much data... oi...Genx87 - Friday, March 17, 2006 - link
Did you put any memory into this thing or just use the basic 64MB for the OS?Curious if you didnt, if the performance throughput would increase from a larger memory?
PuravSanghani - Friday, March 17, 2006 - link
The ReadyNAS units come with a 256MB SO-DIMM module. However, transfer performance would be limited by the the NIC anyway.Purav
WileCoyote - Friday, March 17, 2006 - link
was journaling turned off? I've heard that has a big impact on performanceGenx87 - Friday, March 17, 2006 - link
Any chance they are planning on releasing an 8 part config?Read\write wasnt terribly impressive at 24MB\sec. That is hardly pushing the disks.
But for what i need it for that is plenty. But the 4 disk limitation kind of turns me off.
WileCoyote - Friday, March 17, 2006 - link
Doesn't look like they have plans for 8 drives - they seem more interested in downsizing and compacting. There is a lot of info in their forums. At first I was turned off by the 4 drive config but then I realized it would work since I could hotswap.