ReadyNAS 1100 Unsatisfactory

mrjoltcola wrote:
I never got an alert about anything besides the fact that there was an update available.

Ok. Normally a disk failure is indicated by alerts before it fails, but this is not always the case. SMART+ is not perfect.

mrjoltcola wrote:
I didn't realize the Sparc version was so much slower. Now that I've had a bad experience, I am not sure whether to put these back into production, or just sell them.

The Sparc version use slower CPUs and come with 256MB RAM. Frontview may take a while to do things, but most people will setup and then rarely use Frontview after that so it's no big issue. File transfers are 2-3x faster on the NVX compared with the NV+ (Sparc ReadyNas I use). Not sure how the 2100 compares with the 1100, but my guess is it's probably something similar.

mrjoltcola wrote:
The purpose of using such a product is for low overhead maintenance, and everytime I've tried to fiddle with the RAID setup on these, it has resulted in a brick wall.

Once setup it should be low overhead maintenance. A disk fails and it can be replaced without downtime. It's only when multiple disks fail or some other hardware failure that it becomes more of a hassle to get up and running again.

mrjoltcola wrote:
It seems that RAIDar starts out with an initial RAID build that could go for 10hrs+ and I cannot interrupt it to build a 3 drive RAID 5 + hot spare. I definitely do not want a 4-drive RAID 5 because the failure I mentioned cost me a lot of time and money. It is not so much space that I need, but redundancy. That is why I prefer 2 RAID-1s or RAID 5 + spare. I just cannot seem to get there.

Hopefully once the volume is created, you can delete it and get what you want.