Hot-swappable NAS appliance?

DiabloRojo

DiabloRojo

Limp Gawd
Joined
Sep 7, 2005
Messages
251
Does such a thing even exist?

I've been trying (unsuccessfully) to find a 'simple' gigabit NAS appliance that will let me swap drives on the fly and access them without any rebooting, dealing with RAID or any special disk-based backup fluff... I'm hoping some [H]'ers will have seen something like this out there because I'm at my wit's end and I'm having no luck with searches..

Long story short, I want to send someone a drive they pop in, copy half a terabyte or so within a few hours, pop it out and ship it back.

External USB/Firewire drives are too unreliable, FTP too slow, tape and disk-based backup systems are major overkill (not to mention way too expensive).
 
You say NAS but is it for multiple computes? What about using a hotswap bay, just send the tray back and forth. Another idea, if you have access to it, is just use eSATA which is plenty fast.

Off hand not sure of literally any NAS devices that do what you want easily.
 
Thanks for the suggestions!

The infrant readynas is damn close, but so far as I can tell, they're all RAID, no JBOD setup...:(

A hotswap bay is pretty much what I'm looking at except I just want it to run off the network rather than a machine with eSATA or SCSI. I don't know why this seems so hard for someone to produce.. maybe there's just no demand for something so niche-ish. Or maybe it's just a newer idea than I realized.

Unfortunately none of the hardware I have to work with has eSATA or the capability of adding it. The end-users I'll be dealing with also aren't exactly technically inclined so adding a computer/server into the mix as another a point of failure doesn't sit very well.

*After a few cups of Coffee Del Diablo, I came across these Thecus jobs. They're actually pretty close! They claim real JBOD adding/hot-swapping (if only requiring the services to restart for the new drive to be available). Now I want one of these for myself...
 
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