I picked up a used ReadyNAS 1100 to precede my ReadyNAS NV+. It won’t give me an extra bedroom or more kitchen space but it will keep track of my electronic document storage, email, music, videos, and photos with plenty of room to spare.

In reality, the 1100 is an older unit than my ReadyNAS NV+. However, it has two advantages for the farmhouse project. First, it is a 1U rack mount unit so it will go into the equipment room and completely out of sight and sound of the residence. Second, it is an 8 terabyte until ! Of course, 8TB with RAID5 redundancy means only 6TB of usable storage but that is a lot more than my current 2.1TB of usable storage.

My plan is to to make the 1100 the primary "on all the time" unit and then do weekly backups of primary data to the NV+. The NV+ will only power up once each week for a few hours to accomplish the backups (probably using rsync or something similar). In addition to my personal and work files, PC backups, and all of the documentation for the farmhouse project, the "primary data" will also include all of my photography – especially as I start to digitize nearly 15 years of 35mm photography from my time over seas in China, Japan, Singapore, and Borneo, as well as my travels around the USA visiting family and friends.

I was curious so I did some digging to understand what’s inside the 1100. I had to chuckle at what I found. The ReadyNAS units run a trimmed down embedded instance of Linux. In addition to the file storage operating system and some utilities, end users can install a few addons. All of this gets stored in "flash memory". The ReadyNAS 1100 specs say it has 256Mg of flash memory. When you see a picture of the system board, you may be surprised at how that "256 MB of flash storage is installed" – it’s a USB FLASH DRIVE !

The USB flash drive is clearly visible on the left of the photo. The 512MB of RAM is a standard laptop DIMM located near the middle of the photo.