Where do I get additional drive trays? (forReadyNAS Ultra 2)

mdgm wrote:
Apart from replacing a failed drive there really is no need for a spare drive tray. Even then it doesn't take long to remove four screws etc..

That's rather ghetto. I work at a large Internet hoster.. and we had to replace screws on our RAID drives to swap one out.. we would stop using that vendor. Extra cold-stanby drives, ready in trays are a must. Especially if I'm thinking about going to a larger NAS head. When you start swapping out multiple drives (in the case of a volume size-grow), labeling the drives (externally) becomes a must. Doing so without multple trays is a show stopper (and inviting corruption).

As for rotating backups off-site I hope you don't remove the drives from inside the ReadyNAS but rather use e.g. USB disks. Handling drives bare you risk damaging them through Electro Static Discharge without realising it. Not to mention the risk of damaging SATA connectors through repeated pulls. SATA connectors are only designed for a limited number of pulls.

My plan WAS indeed to have offsite pulled-drive rotations. This is a valid form of off-site "snapshots"... and yes, I'm well equipped to handle ESD (static bags, aluminum foil wrapped drives, etc). Although I didn't know about the USB backup feature. That does seem more advantageous.. :)

Any good pointers or articles on doing the USB backups? Does the integrated tool do it at the block level or is it rsync based?

Tweeks