I’ve been looking for to build a network-connected storage solution that can handle a couple terabytes without costing me thousands of dollars or being so slow that it’s not really usable.
Based on the reviews I’ve read, Infrant’s Ready NAS NV seems to fit the bill nicely.
This is a standalone networked device that holds up to four SATA hard drives in hot swappable trays. The device comes configured with Infrant’s X-RAID technology, which for my purposes means that when I put four 500gb hard drives in it, I will effectively have 1.5 terabytes of effective storage space in a RAID 5 setup, so there’s built-in redundancy in case one of the drives fails.
But the Ready NAS NV has another backup feature I really like. The device had three USB 2.0 ports to attach external drives. The user can then set up backup jobs on the Ready NAS NV so that the device will copy selected files and directories on the device to the external USB drives. So add three 500gb external hard drives, and you’ve got a complete backup copy on external drives. Take those and use them to make offline backups to DVD once a week or so and you’ve got many layers of data redundancy.
The Infant Ready NAS NV without any hard drives can be found online for about $670. Add $1,200 for four 500gb hard drives, and you’ve got 1.5 TB of redundant storage for just over $1,800. Not bad.
Add to that that most reviews I ran across put the Ready NAS NV at the top or near the top for data transfer from a consumer-grade device like this, and you’ve got a kick-ass storage solution.