After being inbound for nearly a week, my new ReadyNAS NV+, kassad, has arrived and is online. Right now I’m doing a five hour iometer burn in test to get baseline performance numbers for CIFS with Jumbo Frames. Once that’s done I’ll start the long, involved process of moving the 2TB of data on nemes over to kassad, repave nemes to get the new 16K-per-block v4 filesystem, move everything but the media files back over to nemes, and leave kassad as a dedicated media server.

As promised, I’ve got my hands on an Infrant ReadyNAS NV+, which is a small NAS appliance capable of holding up to four SATA hard drives, each up to 750GB large.

Background

For those of you who don’t know, a NAS, or Network Attached Storage, is a device on a network that provides storage space for other nodes on the network. If you’ve ever used a file share, you probably used NAS.

I’ve previously noted with horror that I’ve exhausted most of the 1TB of RAID 5 storage on aenea, with a deluge of video and picture files.

This week I’m in Colorado for my brother’s graduation, and have taken the time to select and order a new NAS solution.

I ended up selecting the Infrant ReadyNAS NV+. I ordered the 1GB RAM version with no disks from eAegis for about $700, and four 750GB Baracuda SATA drives from newEgg for under $1200. Once I put it all together, I’ll have 2.25 TB of available storage capacity.

Just as I was going to copy season 3 of Highlander to aenea, my 1TB NAS system, I ran out of free space on the /usr volume, to which the bulk of the storage had been allocated. Nearly 850GB, gone in a little over a year. Sure, I could clean house a bit and make a little room, but the sad fact is, I need more storage.

I haven’t made a build vs buy decision yet, but I will point out that there seems to be a blind spot in NAS offerings between 1TB and 3TB; plenty go up to 1TB, plenty pick up at around 3TB, but where’s the midrange?