Assembling a network storage server from spare bits

I have a pile of old hard drives sitting in an attic closet gathering dust — but out of the hands of identity thieves, not polluting the water supply and generally staying out of trouble. So when I saw a diskless version of the Netgear ReadyNAS NV+ super-cheap, I decided to buy it and conduct a network-attached storage experiment.

The ReadyNAS is a cool little box, much smaller than a shoebox, but heavy! Feels like it’s filled with lead and that’s before you add any had drives. Set-up is simple. Pop out one to four of the hard drive sleds, use the included screws to add in a coyple o’ drives and pop the sleds back in. There’s a multi-OS setup program that you add to your computer called RAIDar. I turned on the ReadyNAS, hooked it to the network with an ethernet cable and waited. And waited and waited.

Seems the ReadyNAS had to format the two drives I added and do some additional mucket-mucking before the box was ready to use.

I left the box alone in my office for a few hours and when I came back I was able to go through all the setup tasks, including deciding whether to use the box as a Time Machine backup destination, an iTunes server and a Tivo server. You can also use it as a standard file server, a printer server and so on. By default, the box is saving everything in a redundant fashion, so the 3 TB of installed storage is only 1.5 TB of available space. I’m not sure how to alter that setting — there’s no obvious RAID settings menu — but I’m pretty sure there is a way because the product specs claim support for RAID 0, 1 and 5.

There is one down side and it’s pretty significant for some uses. The ReadyNAS is loud, really noticeably load, whenever it’s on, even if you’re not accessing the data on its disks. There’s a power saving setting that’s supposed to shut down the disks after a set amount of time but even after that’s triggered, there is still a substantial noise from teh fan. That kind of stinks unless you have a server closet and definitely rules the ReadyNAS out for home theater uses if it is to sit in the same room with you.