Infrant ReadyNAS RN600-1000 1.0TB(Seagate SATA) System RAID5 GbELanr – Customer Reviews
Nice product!
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This is a slick product that exceeded my expectations in most areas. It has considerably more features than most NAS products in this price range. Some big ones are the ability to stream media, and/or act as a file share for several different kinds of network music and media players. Considering it's NOT running any form of Windows this is all the more impressive.
It's quiet and regulates its fan speed based on the actual temp of the drives. Some NAS boxes are noisy.
It's easy to set up although the menus are a bit sluggish at times. It has both a simple wizard-like set up and an advanced mode allowing more options to "power" users.
It has USB ports that do some unexpected things including interface to a UPS for unattended clean shutdown while on battery if the power goes out. It will also (haven't tested this yet) make USB attached drives (including cameras, MP3 players, etc.) and printers available as shares on the network. It can even automatically dump your pictures to a file folder as soon as you plug it in.
Unlike a lot of the low-end NAS boxes, this one is designed and supported in the USA and it shows. The designed-in-Asia NAS boxes have much more cryptic interfaces, less elegant firmware, fewer features and marginal documentation.
While the Infrant ReadyNAS outperforms most of its competitors (based on the tests I've seen and my own tests), it's not quite as zippy as a fast Windows server machine. Considering it's small size, much lower power consumption, and 24x7 stability, however, this is a fair trade-off for most applications. It's fast enough to approach fully utilizing a 100BaseT 100Mb network connection during reads and using more than half the available bandwidth during writes.
FYI, it's available with drives of various capacities or without any drives. There's also a version optimized for A/V home use (the X6) and one for more normal file use (the 600)--they're almost identical but not quite. You can also choose between black and silver.
The price of NAS boxes like this one will probably keep dropping as they become more of a commodity. But, right now at least, Infrant has the best thing going and the price is reasonable.12/4/2005 12:00 AM | Rating:
very quiet and less than 15 minutes to set up
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My Infrant came pre-configured as RAID 5 spread across four 250 GB SATA disk drives.The actual amount of available storage is only around 630 GB because of the RAID 5 overhead and 32 GB reserved for journaling.It took about fifteen minutes to plug in and set up the Infrant.My Windows XP desktop machine automatically recognized the newly available shared folders served by the Infrant.The Infrant is very quiet (Net wisdom is that this is quieter than the competitive Buffalo NAS), producing about 10 percent as much noise as the desktop PC, which was custom-assembled supposedly as a "silent PC".
I use the Infrant as the core of a whole-house music system.When the Windows machine needs to be rebooted or is suffering a 100 percent CPU load doing photo processing the Sonos music boxes just pull the MP3 files directly from the Infrant.
Just make sure that your machines are plugged together with a 100Mbit or Gigabit Ethernet switch.Otherwise the file transfer can be slow.10/10/2005 12:00 AM | Rating: