Spare hot-plug disk trays?

Even if the hardware is better in this regard it's still not advisable to remove the drives regularly. Handling the drives bare you still risk damaging them. The backup functionality in Frontview is there for a reason.

Once you have broken the small fragile piece of plastic covering the SATA contacts on a drive, resulting in the contacts sticking out with no support whatsoever, thus rendering the drive unusable, you will understand the wisdom of not cycling the drives. The SATA drive design was intended for the drive to be connected and left. In my case it was a desktop drive with no critical data, so I only suffered the loss of a drive, not data which would have been more important.

That is not even considering the potential of static sparks. Remember Murphy is always lurking.

I can tell you that we have a old NV model that we have been successfully doing this on for over 2 1/2 years. As far as I know there is no more cost effective way to backup 4-8 GB of Data and take it offiste weekly with full redundancy.

If we have a fire and my whole Shop burns down, I can get a new ReadyNas overnighted to me and have all of my data including server images etc.

Our database is backed up via FTP, but you can not transmit 6 GB of backups over a t1 and restoring the data would take forever.

FYI, the 1500 is the replacement for the NV, which is still kicking and going to a remote location to be used for non-mission critical backups.

You can easily put 4-8 GB of data on a USB key. Far more cost effective than using mechanical hard disks with heaps more space. I think you mean 4-8TB of data.

You may be fortunate for now, but eventually you're going to find you have a problem if you keep this up. It's not a matter of if, but when.