Vadim Chobanu

Let’s be honest – who has the confidence in windows to take care of their precious memories? Especially when one frequently experiments with the OS, or upgrade. An interesting event happened to me a good few years ago that changed the way I look at data, when I obtained a copy of Windows Longhorn alpha (now developed into Vista) and I couldn’t wait to play with. At the time, I was still a student (hadn’t started Vadim Computers yet) and I had no other HD than my main 60Gb system drive which I partitioned as a 20Gb for my Primary OS, 15Gb for my experiments and 25Gb for data. Interestingly enough, it was shortly after my wedding and the only copy of my wedding pictures were on that same HD, the storage 25Gb partition. Nonetheless, I rebooted, inserted the longhorn alpha CD in, got the to the partition select screen, selected the empty 15Gbpartition, got windows to install, rebooted – all seemed fine, got to admire the new OS and started playing with. A few hours later, I realise the partition is a bit larger than 15Gb and looked on my storage drive to find NO PICTURES! Imagine the panic I was in. The newly created family was in jeopardy – no way would my wife have forgiven the loss of all the wedding pictures…restart to Windows XP – no pictures there either! In fury, I formatted the longhorn partition and then I said – calm down, deep breath, remember the grandfather said – there is always a solution out of any problem. So time for data recovery it was, a long day and night with no sleep until I recovered them all one by one. So since then obviously there is no more playing with the drive where I keep the data

However, storing the data on a USB HD I found it rather inconvenient as I do require remote access to my data and I can explain why. Just one example, please don’t laugh though, I know – I have my issues, but hey – who doesn’t! I am an workaholic, so even when I go on holidays, I like to keep busy in the mornings when I can’t sleep, so having access to all my files is essential if I want to have some work done.

Therefore, a fileserver was more suited for my needs, however I am not particularly a big fan of having one to burn some few hundred watts per hour just for some pictures, music and the growing number of documents, so I have watched closely the NAS market and its developments over the past few years. The idea of using a low power CPU and memory to have a file server in my opinion is great.

My first experience with a NAS box was a WD MyBook World II – dual HD RAID NAS with gigabit connection. I purchased it for the company about 1.5 years ago as it was needed as a network backup location. Nice little device, that could do RAID0, RAID1 and JBOD, but a little bit too slow. The CPU was quite weak – an Oxford Semiconductor running at 200Mhz. Nevertheless, I did the SSH hack and gave it a try in the Linux environment. I installed transmission on it (a Bittorrent and download manager application for Linux) and I did face all sorts of problems while doing so, combined with the slow speed I gave up and left it for use just as a Network share.

However about 6 months ago I decided to get a NAS box for my personal use and having seen so much noise around the Thecus brand, i decided to get their entry level n299 NAS, without even doing my research. I am not going to go into details about this one, but it made me remember the words of a good old friend – ‘I am not that rich to buy cheap stuff’, so it ended up on eBay and I was back to basics – what to buy. This time i took my time and read everything available about current NAS boxes, before I finally decided to give Netgear a go. I know, the Netgear’s old SC101 was rubbish, however the new ReadyNas Duo looked very promising.

Below I took a few pictures of what it looks like and what’s inside when you take the panels off. 

ReadyNas Duo