Infrant Technologies ReadyNAS NV 1TB

Reviewed by: Nando

Duration of ownership: 2 Months

Strengths: Easy to set up. Easy to expand.

Weaknesses: Had a fan cooling problem. Infrant recommended a firmware upgrade to run fan at higher speed, but alternative of reversing fan direction was better. This could have been explained better.

Overall Evaluation: I bought an empty Infrant ReadyNAS NV+. Then I bought two Samsung 500GB OEM drives which gave me ~450 GB of usable space. I added two more Samsung 500GB OEM drives a month later and now have 1.33TB of usable space. My total cost was just over $1,200 including tax and shipping, or $0.60 per GB (based on 2TB worth of drives). Don't buy this with just 1TB made up of four 250GB drives. I also experienced a problem with ZoneAlarm on a cpmuter. It took me several days to figure out it was preventing the ReadyNAS from being accessible for file access. A ZoneAlarm user forum user explained that the Firewall "Trusted Zone Security" level had to be set to Medium (Sharing Mode) instead of High (Stealth Mode). Once the setting was adjusted the ReadyNAS worked just fine. It takes a long time for the ReadyNAS to set up the drives for use; 6-10 hours. But, it was worth doing this to save about $400 over the best price I could find for a preset up system.