I needed some storage, went whole hog... the Ready NAS NV+

I was rapidly chewing up disk on my laptop with photos, video and music. I had two major options on the table: external drive via firewire or network attached storage (NAS). I already had an external drive that I was using for backups but it felt so limiting after being wireless. I decided to shell out some more bucks (and time) and chose the NAS option...

Purchase

There are several NAS products out there, but the king of the hill seemed to be the Infrant Ready NAS NV+. After doing a bunch of research on the other options, it really seemed like the Infrant products had it all. I ended up purchasing the Ready NAS NV+ from Excaliber PC with four 250GB drives and 1GB of RAM (free shipping). Total cost $1,109.00 which is $1.10 per gigabyte... not bad!

Install

I was pretty psyched when I got it and was really suprised at its small form factor (8"H x 5"W x 9"D). First thing I did was completely re-arrange my computer cabinet; it was a huge mess of cables, printers, modems, routers, etc. When I got my low power NorhTec, I sort of crammed it into the cabinet when a reorg was pretty necessary even at that time. Anyway I got everything sorted out and ended up with a nice looking setup. I was a little apprehensive putting the NAS in a relatively closed-in cabinet (due to heat) but I did it anyway. FYI, no heat problem even with the doors closed. I plugged the power cord into a strip and a network cable into the router.

Next I installed the RAIDar software on my laptop and fired it up.

It detected the NAS automagically and I was able to click the setup button to access the web based Infrant FrontView management software. It wasn't hard to get started.. even without configuration (SMB and AFP) shares popped up in the "Network" area within Finder (OSX). So which protocol should I use?

Protocol Choices

Well it is more complicated than that.. the Ready NAS actually allows you to use any and all of six different access methods.. Common Internet File System (CIFS/SMB), Network File System (NFS), Apple Filing Protocol (AFP), File Transfer Protocol (FTP), Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), and Rsync.. which one to choose ?!?

I ran some performance tests using each protocol and recorded the throughput that I could get over wireless.

The results pretty much speak for themselves. NFS was the winner in terms of speed and consistency. HTTP was speedy but not really appropriate for a network share. SMB was fast enough to stream a compressed movie but its spottiness (up and down) ruled it out. AFP was really consistent but at the expense of raw speed. FTP was really consistent but was the slowest and used a lot of transmit (upload).

Note: I ran a couple of the tests over again cabled and found the same relative results.

All in all I was debating between NFS, SMB or AFP as mount points. I thought AFP would do best with OSX, but I was mistaken; NFS was the best one. Next I wanted to have the NAS shares automount whenever my laptop was attached to my home network.

Automount NFS share in OSX

There are a few ways to do this in OSX but I think there is only one true way.

Windows way

One way is by using user start up.. let's call this the Windows way:

• In Finder do a Command+K (Go --> Connect to Server).
• Type in the address of the NAS (e.g. nfs://infrant-nas/media)
• The share should pop up in a finder window and you should see an icon in the left hand side of the Finder window.
• Next go to System Preferences --> Accounts
• Navigate to the account that you would like to share automatically load --> Login Items tab
• Click the + button --> Recent Servers in the Dropdown at the top of the window --> pick nfs share (e.g. infrant-nas-media)

The thing that sucks about this method is that:

1. The finder window always pops up on a login
2. Sleeping unmounts the share
3. There is a better unix way.

What is kind of nice about this way is that it will work with one minor change for any of the other protocols available: For CIFS/SMB use smb://infrant-nas/media as the connect string and you are good to go on a Samba share. For AFP use afp://infrant-nas/media as the connect string.

Unix way

The other way to do this is to create a static or dynamic automount, making use of OSX's unixness.. the true way: It is really pretty simple.. open the NetInfo tool (use spotlight if you can't find it). Navigate to mounts --> New...

With a dynamic automount you can find your share in Finder in Network --> Servers --> Name (e.g. infrant-nas in image above)

For a static mount:

• remove the opts property (or just blank out the value)
• set the dir value to /Network/WhateverYouWantToSeeInFinder
• restart the automount daemon (Unix way) or reboot the machine (Windows way)

The static monts can be found in Network --> WhateverYouWantToSeeInFinder Icon.

To restart the automount daemon, open Terminal, find the automount process (/automount/Servers), send a HUP to it...

Last login: Wed Feb  7 01:03:20 on console
Welcome to Darwin!
mbp:~ matt$ ps -A |grep fstab
  173  ??  Ss     0:04.15 ... -f -m /automount/Servers -fstab ...
 2673  p1  S+     0:00.00 grep fstab
mbp:~ matt$ sudo kill -1 173

Conclusion

That's it.. maybe I'll write another little article describing how to push various things to the network share.. The whole point right ?!?

I use the NAS mount points for my:

• user home directory
• iTunes music storage
• iPhoto library storage and editing
• iMovie editing (not fast enough over wireless; only when connected via a cable)
• backup directory (via the bundled and really nice Retrospect software that comes with the NV+)

Now that I have this NAS, I don't think I would ever go back to some kind of separate hard drive solution. However, this definitely isn't for everyone and I don't think it ever will be. It is so easy to hook up a standalone firewire drive that NAS in the home will probably never get widespread adoption. I mean what normal user wants to think about network setup, RAID arrays, mount points or file protocols?