As a followup to the the last article I wrote, the expansion of the volume in the ReadyNAS worked as advertised. After getting all of the new 1TB drives switched in over the course of several days, the machine requested a reboot to expand the volume size. As you can see from the image, we now have 2,738 GB of redundant storage! The other nice thing was that (other than the final restart) the volume was online the whole time while I switched out the drives.
When we bought a ReadyNAS NV+ at work a year ago we did it so that the graphics department could quickly access archived auction material over the LAN instead of digging back through books of DVDs. And it has worked very well. SuiteG is isolated on our network to a local gigabit switch which has provided impressive throughput to and from the different workstations and the ReadyNAS. We've seen speeds of 60MB/s over the gigabit switch and 11MB/s on through the rest of our office. What's more is that the AFP server works well with our MacOS workstations and searching with spotlight is very useful from the client computers.
Our office creates a lot of data -- data that is routinely asked for months after it has been archived and forgotten about. That is what made the ReadyNAS worth the price. At the time (before Infrant was purchased by Netgear) we purchased an empty ReadyNAS NV+ with 1GB RAM for about $800. I think we spent another $600 on 4 x 500GB drives for a total (with shipping) of around $1,500. Expensive, but it did give us 1.4TB in a redundant RAID array. While a terabyte of data seems huge, it has not taken long to fill it up.
The system itself just hangs on the network, not having powered down since we bought it other than a reboot for a firmware update. Actually it wasn't until a month ago that I switched the setting that now allows the drives to spin down after lack of use so they've been spinning for about a year without incident. Actually I don't think they spin down at all because our gateway to the internet logs its traffic directly to the ReadyNAS every hour.
I have an rsync job that copies my documents to the ReadyNAS periodically, but the majority of the space has been taken up by archived auction photos, maps and brochures. We have the whole state of Indiana's orthophotography, topos, and soil maps plus every other county from the many states that we've worked in over the last 3+ years stored there as well. A quick search via Spotlight confirms over 10,000 digital photographs are stored there.
And so, it is because of all of that data that I received an email last month telling me that the volume had reached 80% of capacity. That means, for us, about 2 more months of data creation before we would again need to start archiving the oldest auction folders to DVD. Not the end of the world, but we decided to go ahead and increase the capacity of the ReadyNAS.
Current drive capacity has doubled from a max available of 500GB when we bought the ReadyNAS to 1TB. We selected (of the three approved drives) the Samsung 1TB HD103UJ and are now in the process of switching out the drives one by one. Doing so will increase our available storage to 2.8TB, which should last us another year (I hope),
The type of RAID used by the system is X-RAID, described below:
NV+ comes with X-RAID
The NV+ goes actually a step further than just RAID. It uses an ingenious patent-pending technology developed by NETGEAR called X-RAID. With X-RAID, you can expand your data volume from one disk all the up to four disks while the ReadyNAS is serving up files. Not only that, once you're near capacity with the 4-disk data volume, you can replace each disk one-by-one with larger disks, and your volume capacity grows vertically [what does that mean? -KJ] -- all the while your data is still intact. And best of all, you data volume can keep growing every time larger disks become available. No other NAS in its class has this type of future-proofing concept, period.
I think 4TB is a hard limit on aggregate HDD size, but I'll be thrilled if someday we could add even larger drives to the machine. One caveat is that the re-sync of each drive replaced takes about 8 hours. Replacing all of the drives in the ReadyNAS will take at least 4 days. I'm anxious to see at what point the volume size will grow -- with each disk or when all of the new disks are in. We'll know in 3 more days!
UPDATE: see the followup article here.
On my 3rd birthday I was probably fighting with my brothers down in Brownsburg while Rex Schrader was selling the first multi-parcel real estate auction in Indiana. Last night, after 30 years, RD and I managed another auction of what was sold as Tract II back in 1978.
Back then Rex was selling 450 acres for the Estate of Dale B. Poyser in the first example of multi-parcel bidding in Indiana. He had a computer at hand with custom software to help with the calculations of the six tract auction. The land is located just east of Wolf Lake, Indiana and touches several lakes including Williams, Poyser, Marl, and Deep Lake. On that day, Tract II was sold individually for $640 per acre, a fair price at the time.
Last night that same parcel of land was sold for approximately $5,150 per acre to two buyers, representing an 800% appreciation in land over the intervening 30 years. That works out to an annual appreciation of approximately 26%. In the same period, the Dow Jones Industrial Average has gone from roughly 800 to 12,600 giving an annual gross return of 52%. What should be considered when comparing the two are what impact the farm/timber income, real estate taxes, and -- intangible -- enjoyment of the setting for fishing and recreation would have.
Regardless it is fair to say that this parcel has been a good investment.
Update: Ironically, I ran across this blog post today on LandFlip: Stocks vs. land: Which is the better investment?
