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April 24, 2007
Move over Kuros, Here comes Gollum. The Infrant ReadyNas
Over the past few months I've found the need for space (not speed, just space). With all the video ripping I've been doing for my travels, I've realized the storage requirements are astronomical. I had 2 kuro boxes online for backups, along with the Rhapsody N35 in NDAS mode (all with 320 gb drives). Last month I put another kuro box online and I was going onto the fourth when I realized, there's gotta be a better way. So many boxes pullin' juice, so many network ports. So went my quest for a kuro box replacement.
I had high hopes for the new Kuro box coming out. It was to sport 2 SATA ports which meant I could do mirroring. As cool as the kuro's are, I've always been ansi about not having a hot copy of the hard drive. I always new I would outgrow them. The new Kuro proved that I would not be as happy because it still sported only 1 internal drive. Although there are 2 Sata ports, one is not accessible unless you pull of the front panel. Wtf? it has PCIe and a SATA port, but behind the panel!.
Over the past few weeks I've been considering upgrades in many aspects. It's that time of the year. Still I did not want all my eggs in one basket. I like having my music and video off my herculean workstation. This way I can upgrade him as needed yet still function without him.
There have been 3 choices over the past few weeks.
1. Infrannt ReadyNas NV+
2. Thecus 5200
3. A small ITX server running unRaid from lime-technology
Frankly, I was leaning towards the Thecus or the unRaid server, however I wanted something polished, reliable and low in power usage.
The unRaid server is perfect for what I need, however, It's running a customized slackware. (slopware) kernel. requires specialized hardware and questions to the developer went unanswered. It's now at version 4, but I'm still not sure it's ready for prime time. On the positive side, it has one of the best methods of making your JBOD volumes raid and reliable. Instead of striping across multiple disks, each disks is it's own volume and entitiy. The only requirement is that your largest disk is your parity disk. If that is so, the others can be of ANY size. This raid mechanism also sports the ability to survive multiple disk failures. One disk failure and your raid survives, limps along and can be rebuilt. 2 Disk failures and the failed disks are lost, but the remaining disks are still intact because they each have thier own filesystem. I've learned early on how bad a double disk failure can affect you with software raid 5. None the less, software raid 5 is much more polished these days. As much as I want to do this mechanism, I think the power will be come an issue. Still, I may try my hand at it using vmware on hercules or my itx machine.
I also considered the Thecus. The reports say this performs the best, but it's "rough around the edges". on newegg there was reports of corruption too. This was enough to scare me away... Still, The thecus might be nice as a JBOD server or perhaps rolling my own unRaid md driver.
In the end I settled on the Infrant readynas NV. For 600 bucks I purchased a diskless version. I also purchased 3 750 gb disks. let me tell you this lil guy is small and really good on power. With 2 disks in raid 1 the unit pulls about 50 watts while spinning. When the drives spin down it was pulling 22 watts. This jumps up as you add drives. For 3 drives the power is 30 watts and 60 respectively. The X-raid is a really interesting feature too. it always you to eXpand the Raid array by adding disks on an as needed basis. I started off with two. This morning I added the third, which took 4 hours to initialize. This eve, I rebooted and it automatically eXpanded The volume across the other disk to a whapping 1.3Terrabytes. When I add the 4th it will be just a bit under 2tb.
Another neat feature is you can expand the array over time by swapping each of the 4 disks (one each day). Day one, swap 750 for a terrabyte drive, day 2 and so on and so forth until wala, 3 terrabytes are available. Not too shabby.
The web management interface is quite polished too.
According to tomshardware, the thecus is the top performer, However the readyNas is no slouch either. It's great at serving files, yet slow as molassis at serving the admin pages. We'll see how this performs over time. I'm sure eventually I'll grow into the Thecus also probably using it as a scratch and jbod backup server
Then again I may just use unRaid for that. We shall see.
Now to install my new 1GB switch that supports jumbo frames and I'll be all set.
Pics are in the gallery (available by clicking the picture).
Posted by Me on April 24, 2007 09:00 PM