Unless you've been hiding under a rock the last few days, or don't really care at all, you'll know that Adobe has announced the CS3 edition of products and will be shipping (most) editions soon. Set aside all the fancy new stuff (and there is some GREAT new stuff in there almost regardless which products you use), one of the things I'm most anxiously waiting to see is if they *finally* fixed their bloody installers when it comes to the upgrade products.

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People that know me know that I consume digital storage space at an incredible rate. I have no idea what happens to my free space but as soon as I get some more; it's gone. Quite a few years ago, I built a RAID5 setup in my server using a Promise FastTrack SX4000 RAID controller (with onboard ram and a XOR chip) and four 200GB disks. At the time it was quite a lot, but over the years needs have outgrown the RAID and I now have too much data on non-redundant single drives. Also, I'd like to separate some of the storage from the server, both for cooling, noise and placement reasons. So for a long time now I've been watching the NAS/external eSATA device market with interest, waiting for prices and performance to reach acceptable levels.

Finally it looks like the market is opening up, with several of the big players like Thermaltake (Muse NAS-RAID) and Promise (Promise SmartStor NS4300N) entering the SOHO segment with products of their own, challenging existing players like Stardom and Buffalo who have either traditionally been overpriced or only sold with disks preinstalled at awkward size configurations.

Among all these new and exciting products, one in particular has grabbed my attention. It's the Infrant Technologies ReadyNAS NV+. First of all it's getting good reviews regarding noise levels, something other units like the Thecus N4200 have struggled with. But most intriguing is the promise by Infrant that their proprietary X-RAID technology will not only allow you to start with few disks and gradually increase the number while at the same time growing the volume AND maintaining redundancy, but that you will also be able to incrementally replace the disks with larger drives and actually get the benefit of increased volume out out of it.This might not sound like much of a revolution but if you've dealt with devices like this in the past, or even RAID cards, you'll appreciate this since most solutions seems to force you to destroy and rebuild RAIDs to make any significant changes to them. While some solutions like the Promise SmartStor NS4300N feature online expansion and replacement, I've yet to find anyone other than infrant that will go into details about what their RAID extensions will allow you to do in terms of flexibility and expandability. Also, Infrant seems to be on top of the disk size inflation, with officially supporting 750GB disks while many still list "up to 500GB" (this might be due to outdated product specs, but are you willing to take the chance? I'm not).

The price is still a little above what I'd like to pay for such a device, but considering the ease of mind it brings and the feature list, I feel the time is right to start building a new storage vault based on 750GB disks. And thanks to the virtues of X-RAID, I can start with just the NAS unit itself and another disk (I have one already), and then extend it as I can afford it. That's a great bonus in itself. 2.2 Terabyte redundant storage, here I come!

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