never underestimate the bandwidth of a moving van full of harddrives

What is "RJ453"? I Googled it, that only shows up on sites selling this Netgear or as mis-key of "RJ45" on some China sites.

It's supposed to be 1 x RJ-45, 3 x USB 2.0

Someone just omitted a space.

Also keep in mind you're paying for what's essentially a small computer with a decent RAID card plus 4 drive bays and some proprietary software.

I'm not sure how much the card would cost, but looking down the list you can get that Dell machine for about $370. Find a decent RAID card, and you've got more or less the same thing (plus a monitor, keyboard and mouse... and Dell's preloaded junk)

yeah you can roll your own much cheaper... and it would be exponentially more versatile. Of course, you need to know what the hell you are doing but it's a much better deal.

I agree with roll your own - but how do you put more then 2 HD's in a dell??

Does anyone know of a 3rd party place to buy a HD cage that will fit into a dell case (or any case for that matter?)

I have a 440 Dell server and it can only take 2 hd's. I have 5 hd's sitting on top of each other and dangling all over the case - it's annoying it's a server for christ sake.

Oh yeah, check out FreeNAS for a free BSD based (very good!) pretty much turn-key solution. Can be loaded from a live-cd also. Works great I've used it before, saves a lot of hassle.

i'm inclined to put together my own system too, but i needed to set up a file server for an office that i'm leaving soon, and none of them have even heard of RAID. i decided on this system when it was still sold by Infrant and it's great (assuming netgear didn't butcher it). i wouldn't say it's rodeo cowboy proof, but it's close. it's really easy to set up, and it notifies you by email if anything goes wrong (temp, UPS activated, hd failure, etc.) if you go for it, make sure you check the list of compatible hds and ups before buying everything.

Thanks, I ordered a few for my dialup BBS

I own this. Bought it a year ago back before Infrant was bought out by NetGear. I filled it with 4x Seagate 400GB drives which gives me 1.2TB of usable space from 1.6TB total. It's been rock solid. Heck, I stream movies from it and they play without fail.

The management interface is good. The ethernet ports are actually GigE ports on which you can turn on Jumbo Frame support for added speed. You can configure one or more than one volume from the RAID group. These will show up as virtual drives on your desktop. You can set up users and groups for each volume. There are plenty of protocols to access the drive (AFP, NFS, Samba aka CIFS, iTunes streaming, slimserver streaming, rsync, and WebDAV). As #7 said, whenever there's a reliability change in a hard drive, you get an email notification.

It's more expensive than other options like FreeNAS, but you do get a quality device for the money spent. It picked up several awards for excellence, I'm sure they're all listed at http://infrant.com .

My only regret is that there's no Firewire port. If you can make do with the 3x USB 2.0 ports, than this is a non-issue for you.

I highly recommend this tiny file server.

Well of course it will be cheaper to cobble together your own but for a small business or something, this is a completely hassle free and ready-to-go solution that will perform as well as anything you can put together yourself, and it's got built in functionality that would otherwise be more complex to install or set up yourself.

Yeah, yeah, people say things like FreeNAS, but the reality is that while FreeNAS might be great once you have it up and running, there are a lot of glitchy problems, especially with certain system configurations and hardware that you could run into vs. something like this which is nearly guaranteed to work.

Thank you all for restoring my faith that there are still some intelligent and coherent BB posters out there.

I am the NAS manager at eAegis.com. If anyone has any questions l will do my best to respond and as much as possible in a timely fashion.
ReadyNAS NV+ has transitioned as a product of Infrant Technologies to now NETGEAR. The product quality and compatibility remains at a high level, and is one of the leading NAS products for home and SMB sectors.
In comparision to other NASses the ReadyNAS is a refined and mature product, especially from a firmware perspective, this alone has provided the platform the ReadyNAS NV+ to be a leading product in it's category.
Infrant/ Netgear to provide a compatibility list for all peripehrals including hard drives.
http://www.infrant.com/wiki/index.php/Hardware_Compatibility_List
Hope this helps

mmm Galois ab/bc

anyway - Of course for dedicated/critical main-line functions you would be better to go for a matured product like this that was tested with constants such as case size, etc.

However, don't dismiss FreeNAS, etc. as being inferior in anyway due to them being "free". If you take a good enclosure and use quality parts with stable tested versions, you can achieve excellent reliability. Not quick/easy nor off the shelf such as this, however it all depends on needs/time. Like anything really.

Just don't assume open-source or "free" means low quality.

I can't wait fro drobo to comeout with an ethernet interface...

#5, check out Dell's Smart Values page. You can pick up a PowerEdge 840 for $599 and it comes with space for 4 hard drives. The processor sucks, but it'll be better than the one you get in this Netgear NAS.

http://www.dell.com/content/products/features.aspx/featured_server?c=us&cs=04&l=en&s=bsd

#15, you and me both. Traditional RAID's limitations are infuriating. What do you MEAN it can't re-layout the data after a drive fails, if there's sufficient free space, to regain protection albeit with less usable space? Unbelievable that it took so long for someone to write the Drobo software.

And even more depressing that it's in a proprietary product. I expected that innovation to come from the open-source world.

#13, It's obviously true.

Talking of true, come out of the closet already. Your family will understand. You might have to sit them down when you explain the beastiality fetish though.

if you're looking to "roll your own" check out icydock. They have a 5xSATA II hotplug cage that fits in a 3x5.25" opening. I have one and it works well for what it is. The fan's not the most powerful but it does ok as long as your case has decent cooling to begin with.

The ReadyNAS is pretty cool if you just want to stick something small in a closet and not have to worry about it. power consumption is way lower than a PC since all you're powering is a low wattage processor, the drives, and a fan. Plus the OS / firmware is extensible and includes all sorts of goodies like a UPnP server (slimserver).