Last week (or two weeks ago?) I ordered a Netgear ReadyNAS Duo and it finally arrived the other day. Basically it’s a really large hard drive based storage system you throw onto your network. I don’t really have that much stuff to store, but I think it’s generally good to store and backup my important stuff onto something that’s more robust and failure proof than the single hard drive inside my Macbook Pro, which run kinda hot. I thought about getting a Drobo instead, since it’s got some pretty neat gee-wiz magic going on, but in the end, the ReadyNAS Duo was just more cost effective (and well, actually comes with 500 GB of storage and is network ready out of the box). I can finally rip all my DVDs and start to build a media jukebox of sorts Some of the features that won me over:

• Hands free disk management. It’s not quite as cool as what the Drobo can do, but basically when a disk goes bad, just swap in another drive of equal or larger size. You can even hot swap a disk while it’s still turned on. And really, how often am I going to be swapping drives in and out (the part that makes Drobo cool)?
• Future proof. If I need more storage, I can just swap in bigger drives. The only downside is that both disks would need to get swaped, and they can only be swapped one at a time. But this is something that’s unavoidable in a 2 disk RAID configuration.
• A bunch of streaming media servers: iTunes, Slim Server, and UPnP AV. The UPnP AV server is pretty key, since this can stream movies to my XBox 360, as long as the XBox 360 supports the video codec. Nice.
• Supports FTP, HTTP, AFP, SMB, and Rsync out of the box.

Actually now that I think about it, it’s really just a moderately low powered Linux box (and pretty quite too!). There’s no monitor port or keyboard terminal, but you can activate shell and root access over the network, which basically allows you to go in and install / tweak stuff as needed. It’s not an extremely powerful box, but it is decently capable. You can even run Apache, MySQL, PHP to power your blog… but only if you expect to get less than than a dozen or so visitors. And if you buy it from NewEgg (before Aug 1), they’ll throw in a free 500 GB drive combo, no need to send in any rebate forms. So while the ReadyNAS Duo out of the box only comes with one drive (thus not a RAID), NewEgg will make it a RAID for free I heart NewEgg, and now ReadyNAS.