Camera Owners of the Bay Area

As we mentioned in last month’s presentation, we have a great deal for COBA members. We have secured special pricing for the Infrant ReadyNAS 600 — the world’s smallest RAID 5 Network Attached Storage (NAS) appliance — in the following configurations:

• $200 off the 1TB ReadyNAS with 4×250GB drives. You can specify WD, Hitachi, or Seagate brand drives
• $100 off the ReadyNAS without any drives. You supply your own SATA drives for the box
• $1895 for 1.6 TB ReadyNAS with 4×400GB drives.

If you are looking for a storage solution for your gigabytes of photos, videos, or files, you may want to consider the ReadyNAS. There’s a new review of the system on ExtremeTech. Check it out!

The 1TB drive configuration normally retails for $1395 and the driveless ReadyNAS 600 is $695 (if you can find it). We need at least 10 people to sign up to take advantage of this promotional pricing. If you are looking for a storage solution for your gigabytes of photos, videos, or files, look no further!

Infrant Advantages

The ReadyNAS has been compared to the $999 BuffaloTech Terastation on sale at local Fry’s. Here are some points of differentiation between the two products.

Performance - By incorporating a 4 Channel SATA Controller and a Hardware RAID accelerator directly on the CPU, the ReadyNAS is up to 59% faster on writes and 102% faster on Reads. In comparison, the Terastation relies on IDE drives and Software RAID.

Serviceability - Not only do the Serial ATA drives offer better performance, but the availability of such drives in the next 5 years should facilitate replacement. IDE is an older technology, and many computer manufacturers have already started to migrate away from them. The ReadyNAS Chassis was designed to ease HDD installation and replacement; the Terastation was not (requires removal of 46 screws to replace one drive). Also, by storing the OS Image on compact flash, we enable replacement of the entire drive array at once. The Terastation OS resides on the HDD and does not allow all four drives to be replaced at once.

Interoperability - ReadyNAS offers NFS support for Linux and UNIX. HTTP support is also included allowing for easy and safe file sharing over the Internet as well as allowing you to easily set up an Intranet site out of a share.

Data Integrity - Infrant’s engineers come from an Enterprise NAS background and emphasize data integrity in all situations. User selectable options such as disabiling the HDD write cache, employing a FULL Data Journaling file system, and requiring hardware RAID, are all designed to eliminate potential RAID stripe issues and keep your data safe.

More information can be found here:

• Infrant Website
• Initial Thoughts
• ReadyNas 600 at COBA
• Luminous Landscape Review

Signing Up

If you are interested in participating, please send me an email or come to the next meeting. We’ll take your name and let you know when we have gotten enough people to qualify for the deal. Ten people need to sign up, and we can mix and match configurations (i.e. 2 1TB and 8 barebones configuration or 5 1TB and 5 barebones) to qualify. The promotion ends on June 30.