I recently bought one of these great little 4-bay NAS boxes from Scan for £459 delivered. Then spotted this deal a few days later - doh! It is the same price as Scan's, but you get two free 500Gb Hitachi SATA drives with the device which are worth about £42 each inc VAT.

So for £465ish delivered, you'll have 500Gb worth of protected storage, and the beauty of the ReadyNAS is you can add more drives as you go along to give yourself more space.

I would love something like this but they are just so expensive for what they are.

Original Poster18th Mar 2009

Broadsword;4672063

I would love something like this but they are just so expensive for what … I would love something like this but they are just so expensive for what they are.

I agree - they are not cheap.I recently had two drives fail (completely independently) and lost a few hundred Gb of data - so decided this was a worthwhile investment.I did consider some cheaper 4/5-bay alternatives (Synology CS407e, Thecus 5200B etc) but they were all a couple of years old & had patchy support for newer 1Tb+ drives.

18th Mar 2009

Very good price - buy another 2 hard drives for £90 and you have 1.5TB of protected data storage in a Raid 5 array.

Original Poster18th Mar 2009

alanrowell;4672565

Very good price - buy another 2 hard drives for £90 and you have 1.5TB of … Very good price - buy another 2 hard drives for £90 and you have 1.5TB of protected data storage in a Raid 5 array.

Very true.And in a year or two's time when 2Tb hard drives are £50 a go, you can swap out each 500Gb drive one by one & grow your volume dynamically.

I got one of … I got one of these:]http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Icy-Box-IB-NAS4220-B-2x35-SATA-HDD-RAID-0-1-Span-(NRAID)-JBOD-1Gb-LAN-plus-2xUSB-7-Servers-inoneIt is only 2 disks but it is a lot more cost effective @ £90 + drive costs.

Yes, I have two of these. But they are dreadfully unreliable. I couldn't get the RAID to work at all, and if they're left on for more than a few days, you need to reboot them to get them working again. You may have better luck, depending on your choice of drives. It seems the Samsung 1TB ones just aren't very compatible with it.

Personally, I'm a Buffalo Linkstation fan. Never had much of a problem with those, although the Terastation is getting a bit pricy if you really want a 4-way RAID system.

Original Poster19th Mar 2009

nxsfan;4675058

I am curious about the power requirements of these devices. Leaving my … I am curious about the power requirements of these devices. Leaving my server on 24/7 makes me wince when I think about power consumption.

Netgear's website says:

The ReadyNAS NV+ takes it a step further. For instance, in an idle state, the NV+ with one disk consumes 31W and with four disks consumes 54W of power, less than your typical incandescent light bulb. It’ll take a few more watts when there is disk activity. In disk spin-down mode, the NV+ consumes only 29W.

Furthermore, if you use the automatic power-on scheduler, you’ll save even more. For instance, if you plan on accessing the ReadyNAS only during an 8-hour window each day, your average usage of the box can be as low as a third of the 29W, or around 10W. All without compromising on performance.