Home Office goes Gigabit
The last piece of the Home Office IT upgrade arrived today and it’s been installed. Last week ended with the arrived of 2 750GB SATA drives. I started this week by replacing my very modern but overly faulty Linksys router with a middle of the road and very stable Netgear router. I paired it with a Netgear Gigabit switch. To speed things up a bit, I updated my media server with a Gigabit PCI card.
Today, The ReadyNAS NV+ arrived. The first thing that struck me was the heft of the NAS. It’s no bigger than a two-slice toaster but it weighs about 8-10 lbs.
The SATA installations went smoothly. The instructions were easy. About 5 minutes later, the NAS had 1.5GB of HDD loaded (only 666GB are usable because of RAID1 and journaling).
The ReadyNAS configuration UI is an intuitive albeit lengthy web interface. It took about 15 to get through all of the configuration. The NAS has every conceivable service. I configured SMB, FTP, HTTP, HTTPS, and an iTunes Server. I opted for group and user level security. I could have gone with the basic Microsoft based WORKGROUP (and it also supports Microsoft Domains) but I wanted some familiarity across to my Linux servers.
I was very impressed by the email notification support - it worked without messy interfacing to my ISP SMTP. It not only sends alerts for warning and error situations but it also email notifies users when FTP accounts are created for them.
The one surprise was the “synchronization” phase. I installed two unformatted disks. The NAS automatically formatted the first drive and configured it right away. Within about 15 minutes the NAS was “open for business”. The second drive was formatted quick enough but it was another 5 hours (that’s not a typo) for it to synchronize with the first drive. I found that really strange since the first drive was empty to start.
The real work will be transferring all the data off the media server onto the NAS. The Gigabit switch will be busy !
