Infrant ReadyNAS X6

Reviews: Networking

Infrant ReadyNAS X6

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Richard Poelling
Brian
Infrant
Dec. 7, 2005

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Hard drives

Let's take a quick moment to look at the hard drives that will be installed in the X6. These are 400GB SATA NL35 drives manufactured by Seagate. These are the same people who produce the Barracuda line of hard drives. The NL in the NL35 stands for Nearline. This designation really comes more from the enterprise, than the home, but the idea is that storage forms 3 tiers. You have your desktop storage and your archival storage, the nearline storage is what fits in between. Items that you might not need every day, but you definitely want access to on a regular basis might make up this type of storage. These types of drives are what keep our file servers busy and full on a daily basis. The NL35 also has a 1.0 million hour MTBF, or Mean Time Between Failure. Since these are more of an enterprise class drive, their operating temps are set a bit higher. Therefore, I will be expecting a lot from these drives. No matter how good a drive is, once it fails, you lose the data. Granted, you could potentially recover some, perhaps even most of the data, but data recovery can be rather costly. This is where RAID solutions become necessary. By combining a good drive with hopefully a good NAS, I will enable greater amounts of secure, reliable, and backed up storage.

Setup

Firing up the device for the first time will initialize the drive and prompt the device set up. After the initial boot, I connected to the X6 by way of Infrant's included remote software call "RAIDar." This software will search your network for all available NAS devices and allows you to set up and configure each. You can also get the stats on the device without having to do anything else. A series of lights allows you see at a glance just how your NAS is doing.

Clicking the Setup button will launch a web browser and connect you to Frontview by way of a secure SSL connection. You will get a warning about a certificate trust, but I just ignored it since I knew where it was coming from. For most home uses, the SSL isn't a necessity, but in a small office or branch office configuration, especially if you are administrating the device across an internet connection, having your administration stream hacked or otherwise monitored could be a problem, and encryption becomes a greater need. Either way, it is always nice to default to the higher security methods.

The initial setup goes quick and easy. Most of the setup is basic and is performed through the setup wizard which is basically a condensed version of the advanced control section. The setup runs through everything that you absolutely need to get up and running quickly and easily. Items covered during the initial setup include time, basic network setup (Ethernet, DNS, DHCP), security (share, user, domain), shares (protocols, USB shares, printers), system settings (email alerts, administrator password), and finally, ends with the serial number for registration of the product. Once the system has been configured, you will be dropped into the advanced controls which enable you to change any of the previous settings and then some. The advanced controls will be your administration home from now on.

Not only does this device act as central file server, but you can also hook up external USB drives and also set it up as a print server for a USB printer. The X6 also contains a built-in DHCP server, but if you have internet, you most likely have one running anyway. Either way, they are nice features if you need it them. I am not going to go into the USB print server functionality since there are so many printers on the market. If you have concerns about this feature, I suggest you look at Infrant's forums and their hardware compatibility list.

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Page 4 of 10

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Page 1: Introduction
Page 2: First Looks
Page 3: Installation
Page 4: Hard Drives
Page 5: Services
Page 6: Testing
Page 7: Testing: DiskBench
Page 8: Testing: Iometer
Page 9: Quality, Security & Error Reporting
Page 10: Conclusion

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