Missives from the 6th Floor

So I found that Netgear (formerly Infrant) is currently running a deal through Buy.com that would result in a 1TB usable ReadyNAS NV+ for just under $1100, or $1.10/GB. (The "deal" is that if you buy this quarter, they'll toss in another 500GB drive for free.) It seems all around like a good deal, but I'm frugal a cheap bastard, and I object to spending that much money on drive space - especially considering each of those 500GB drives can be had for just over $100 (or $.20/GB).

I did a bit of looking around this morning and found the Drobo, which looks interesting, but it's not network-attached, and the direct-attach perf isn't awesome as compared to other direct attached storage and I'd be limited to NTFS or HFS, which isn't a deal-killer, but isn't great.

Their core idea - being "smarter than the average bear" about RAID config and essentially chopping up the drives into partition sets and using potentially different raid config on each set - is clever (but shouldn't be patentable, after all, that's the config I have on my desktop and have had for years), and can result in more usable storage under heterogenous drive configurations.

Still, the empty unit is $500, and add the $330 for the drives, and a bit of money for something that will host that beast on the network, and you end up pretty close to the ReadyNAS in price/performance.

In theory I'd be ahead a bit, since I have an NSLU2 that I bought a while back with the intent of building a NAS, but my testing revealed that it's performance is pretty mediocre, due in large part to it's lack of GigE, so manipulating large files (say, digital photos) in real-time is pretty much right out.