JESUITS - gadget @ TTS -Ep3- Infrant ReadyNAS NV+

The more bays the more expensive the unit, incrementally, but the more useful and flexible it is too. I think 8 Bays would be great, and the ability to "VLAN" drives into at least 2 volumes might be nice as well. With every bay the 1/N overhead goes down ... and 8 to 10 bays seems like the natural level. That way you can grow your array and at various points decide to either expand horizontally or replace a few smal drives with larger ones as they get cheaper.

> all I have to do to add more space is simply remove a drive and replace it with a bigger one.

This is my point, that is NOT all you have to do.  If you have 4 drives of size X, putting a new drive of size Y, where Y > X will not help you one bit. You have to upgrade your whole array ... and it leaves you will 4 useless drives that are or little value to you.

You can start out with 2 drives, but then you waste 50% of your disks ... with all four drives you only waste 25% of your disks.

And now Netgear/Infrant supports 2TB drives ... which I just filled my box with to give me 5.5 TB or redundant storage. Works very well so far ... just taking a long time to get data into or out of.

Look into QNAP, they have boxes with all kinds of software services. The problem is their support and help is terrible.

themountainviewguy,

Wow... never even saw this comment... thanks YT.

To answer your question: Yes... I've expanded with larger drives. Once you've replaced the last drive you just need to restart the ReadyNAS (sometimes twice) and it will come up with a new volume using ALL available disk space.
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Peace,
Fr. Robert

That took a while ... but you knew the answer so I'll try another. If you start with one drive, then put another in, can you mirror that drive with the data on it?

If so, then if you put another drive in, can you convert to RAID5?

The expense of fully stocking these bays at the beginning with 6 drive that will be obsolete when finally fill it with data is too great. So I would envision starting with a 2TB mirror, and then adding on with 2TB drives as they get cheaper.

themountainviewguy,

No need to convert. The ReadyNAS OS will automatically do what it can to ensure that it is always 1-drive fail-tolerant. If you have two drives, it will mirror. 3 drives, it moves to RAID 5. 4 drives, more efficient RAID 5. Lose a drive out of 3 drive array and it will try to move back to mirroring. (Unless it can't because of a size problem.
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Peace,
Fr. Robert

Thank you Father Robert for this review. I think it is great that Catholic Clergy are getting tech savy and I think this has important implications for the Church. I have a tech related comment. Many of the media players now have internet radio pre-set stations (e.g. Windows Media Player, Orb, Squeezebox). One thing they are all missing are the various Catholic online radio stations. We need to get the word out to these companies that they need to include these stations.

TedTimmis,

Thanks for the kind comment. I wish everybody was as willing to see that Catholics can be geeky too! :)

I actually HAVE seen religious channels built into some of these Internet Radio enabled devices. The problem is that most of the GOOD Catholic content isn't indexed properly.

Hmmm... Perhaps THAT is something that I should start doing...
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Thanks again.
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Peace,
Fr. Robert

AND IT RUNS LINUX!! you can SSH into it right out of the box and install any piece of linux software!!
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$ ssh root@192.168.1.192
root@192.168.1.192's password:
Permission denied, please try again.
root@192.168.1.192's password:
Linux walkershare 2.6.17.8ReadyNAS #1 Fri Sep 19 15:04:06 PDT 2008 padre unknown
walkershare:~#
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