Infrant Ready NAS NV+

I’ve been running a pair of 2TB Infrant Ready NAS NV+ RAID systems for a while now as on-site file server and off-site backup and so far I’m very pleased with them. I have one under my desk and one in my dad’s office and they talk over a VPN and keep each other in sync using rsync. The one under my desk acts as a file server for my development boxes and as a music server for my Squeezebox music players. It seems a little underpowered for the Squeezeboxes, the UI on Squeezebox is annoyingly slow sometimes but I’ve yet to work out if that’s the NAS or the Squeezebox or the network or … Anyway, sticking 1gb of RAM in the NAS didn’t seem to help the Squeezebox performance though the web GUI for the NAS seemed slightly more sprightly than the one with only 256mb… At some point I’ll run a slimserver from one of my dev boxes to see if that speeds things up a little; right now I can work around the slow UI (i.e. I have patience and understanding) and everyone else just queues up commands that all happen at once when the Squeezebox finally decides to respond ;)

The NAS itself is a nice little unit that ‘just works’ and is pretty quiet and doesn’t push out too much heat. The firmware is nice, the web GUI works well and the addon and upgrade system works well. Currently my only wish is that they’d provide a CVS add-on so that I can run a CVS server from it rather than having to run the CVS server on one of the dev boxes and then backup to the NAS manually every so often…

Big rsync jobs take some time (and some) but that’s down to my ISPs upload speed. Still, they work and they don’t get in the way of doing useful work and as I tune how I use the boxes I hope to avoid big and slow rsync jobs. I’ve yet to have to try out the hop swap hard drive functionality to replace failed disks (and long may that be the case)…