------------------------------------------------------------------------ A poll associated with this post was created, to vote and see the results, please visit http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=24534 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Question: What do you think about the new SD NAS device? - Awesome! Where can I get one? - Nice. I'll put that on my wish list. - Not for me, but it sure is pretty. - Lame idea. Have the SD folks lost their minds? ------------------------------------------------------------------------
Well I tried out a 2TB ReadyNAS NV for a couple of weeks and ended up returning it because it was too slow to use as a file server under OS X. Infrant's working on fixes to bring their AFP performance in line with CIFS/SMB, but it's currently pretty slow and behaves very badly with jumbo frames on AFP over TCP. To their credit, their engineering team is responsive and it's nice that they even care about decent AFP performance. From their forum, it sounds like their next kernel will offer noticeable improvements, but it's not out yet. I moved an 86GB music library there (in RAID 5) and tried accessing it via iTunes as a remote volume and I also tried out the built-in SlimServer. Rebuilding/rescaning the database took literally hours upon hours and performing simple operations like setting artwork for an album's worth of tracks took longer than I could tolerate. It just felt dog slow compared to the relatively crippled mac mini it usually runs on. No one who's got a really large music library is going to want to use the ReadyNAS as their primary catalog, at least not in RAID 5 mode on a Mac, and that was pretty much the point of the thing for me, at least with respect to its function as a music server. Once I concluded I would have to cache a copy of the library back on the mini just to get decent performance, it was an easy decision to return it. It's unfortunate because it sounded pretty good on paper, the hardware was nicely designed, and their price/performance seemed about right. (They pack four Seagate 500GB drives into a minimal enclosure with hotswap, SMART monitoring, fan and UPS sensors, and the thing feels like a tank.) But their real world AFP GigE performance was definitely not as claimed and their overall software architecture and configuration just didn't inspire confidence. (Their UI is okay for initial set-up but a complete mess for ongoing maintenance. You know there's this knob because you've seen it, but you have no idea where it's hiding in their UI. That kind of thing. Compared with the SlimServer, which packs an incredible number of bells and whistles into a very clean, intuitive UI, the ReadyNAS was a disaster.) -- ddp ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ddp's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=5187 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=24534 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
