Infrant ReadyNAS NV+

The first, experimental Infrant ReadyNAS NV+ unit arrived just before the weekend. I say experimental, as in the longer run I plan to base a significant part of my home computer / entertainment network on these devices. I have picked the ReadyNAS for several reasons. Basically it is a storage server or even simpler a hard disk with Ethernet interface. There are many units like that on the market. The Infrant is special for several reasons, most of them seem important to me:

• It has redundancy built-in. Up to 4 SATA drives (my initial unit has just two with two empty expansion slots) in various RAID setups. Hard drives do fail. So if you think of storing a significant amount of data, the drive setup should be redundant. In my configuration the Infrant box will have 4x500GB drives, resulting in a 1,5TB capacity with redundancy (4th drive). 500GB drives seem to sin in a capacity/price sweetspot and typical home should do fine now with 1,5TB. Later when larger drives become cheaper the storage can be upgraded. BTW I plan to use the Seagate ST3500630NS drives. The "N" is important here, as opposed to the "AS" series - the N drives are designed for continous 24x7 operation and are better prepared to handle the vibrations coming from the other drives in the same cage. Worth the extra $30 they cost...
• The file system (EXT3) is fully Unicode - compliant. This is especially important when filenames contain special characters. I used to have problems with that on lower end NAS servers like the Linksys NSLU-2.
• You can run the Slimserver and other services on the Infrant box itself. Actually the current Infrants come with the Slimserver preloaded and ready to be configured. Despite some people complaining on the poor Slimserver performance, I do not see this as a problem. Well... the http interface is not lightning fast, but decent enough and the Squeezeboxes perform very well with my library of more than 7000 songs.
• You can schedule automatic backup and replication jobs among several Infrant units. This is important to me, as I intend to have two units (one in each home, serving as a local storage and a remote secondary backup to each other) replicated to each other over a VPN link. Have not tried this yest, but this setup seems what I need.

After two days of playing with the first Infrant unit I must say I am very happy with it. Small, silent, spacious, universal home network storage / streaming server with professional look and feel - recommended!