NAS for the home: how's the Infrant ReadyNAS NV+?

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After one of the busiest six-month periods of my life, I’m back to a little bit of home geeking. I’m on the verge of getting serious about massive storage for home and my research suggests that the Infrant ReadyNAS NV+ is the NAS (network-attached storage) device of choice among geeks. You can buy the box pre-configured, or you can buy your own drives and do it yourself (amazing that you can get 750GB drives now!) I was a little concerned that a company that I’ve never heard of wouldn’t be around if things go bad, but then I read that Netgear is buying Infrant, so that worry goes away.

Here are a couple of reviews I’ve already found:

Barry’s Rigs and Reviews — exhaustive (perhaps even exhausting) but near-insane number of photos of everything about the device, including the ethernet cable that comes in the box! Every admin/setup screen for the software, too.

Club Overclocker (good photos of the device and screenshots of the admin and setup screens)

Anyone out there got any opinions?

(For those with some time on their hands, there’s the open source route with FreeNAS, but for me, it’s all about plug-and-play these days.)

Published by Chad Dickerson

Published

5 thoughts on “NAS for the home: how's the Infrant ReadyNAS NV+?”

  1. I bought an Infrant ReadyNAS NV last year and have been very pleased with it. The NV+ added an LCD screen to the front and made it a bit quieter, I believe, but I barely notice any noise from it.

    I bought it with one drive and have since maxed it out with four. The web interface is easy to understand and has useful, understandable help information in it. It was very easy to install the hardware itself, add drives and, like I said, very quiet even with four drives. The fit and finish of the product is excellent.

    My only issue to date was related to poor performance with Mac OS X. I use it with both Windows XP, 2003, and Mac OS X. I did some research on their support forums and excellent support wiki and found a way to speed up the Mac OS X performance to the drive and all has been great since.

    I would not hesitate to recommend this. I looked at using FreeNAS to roll-my-own and the Buffalo TerraStation and I’m glad I made the choice to go with Infrant.

    Best of luck!

    Eric

  2. funny chad, i was just talking to my boys about the need for adding some storage that we could all attach to on our home network as one of them heads off to college w/ a new laptop but wants to save all his data from his old system – will definitely check this baby out…

  3. Chad – I freaking *love* my ReadyNAS NV+ .. I dropped 4 500gb drives in there for 2tb of storage (well, 1.5 after XRAID). I have an external USB drive that the most important stuff gets sync’d with nightly, and I have the NAS automatically rsync up to the cloud for some things.

    Since getting the NAS, my requirements for a home server have pretty much gone down to a mac mini and the NAS. 🙂

  4. It’s well worth it. And I consider its price a steal. My home is rigged like Steve’s w/ a Mac Mini and the Infrant box, 4*250 gig config. I’m a data redundancy whore, so I’m sooooo pimpin’.

    It rocks because of its hot-swap feature, low fan noise and it doesn’t emit lots of heat. The services such as FTP access w/ ACL control and an iTunes server kicks ass as well.

    It’s also daaaaaamn pretty.

    Worth every penny.

  5. Even better now that Netgear has bought them. Deeper pockets so they are less likely to go away now.

    I don’t own one yet, but the infrant is my #1 choice after looking for the last year or so.

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