Warning: geeky post ahead.

Lately I’ve been struggling a lot with how to manage the many, many, MANY gigabytes of digital photos I have stored. Some day I’ll write a post about my workflow and archiving system, but suffice it to say I have a ton of CDs and DVDs filed away. It’s becoming a major pain in the butt. So I have been considering other options, and a NAS (network attached storage) system is looking really attractive. For my needs, the Infrant ReadyNAS NV+ looks like a great solution. But today, I discovered a very annoying problem.

The ReadyNAS is available in a number of configurations, with various numbers and sizes of disks included. Historically, one of the configurations included no disks, so you could buy your own and add them in. That not only gives you more flexibility, but it tended to save a fair amount of money too. Unfortunately, NetGear acquired Infrant earlier this year, and they’re in the process of revamping the product line. As part of that, they’ve apparently eliminated the diskless version of the ReadyNAS from the product lineup. Last week when I started thinking about, there were diskless units in stock a few places. Now there are none. This makes the ReadyNAS a much more expensive proposition.

Let’s look at a couple of examples.

4x250GB configuration

2x500GB configuration

There’s only one word for this: suckage. I hate it when a good company gets acquired and the product line gets screwed up.

I’m still considering going with the ReadyNAS, but I’m also seriously looking at other options. If you have something you really like, please speak up! Anything I’m going to consider needs at least 500GB of storage in a RAID configuration with the ability to add more, and great compatibility with Macs.

Update: I decided to go with the ReadyNAS anyway. It ended up costing me about $150 more than it would have before, but such is life…

Update 2: For those of you stumbling across this post from Google, there’s some discussion of the topic on Infrant’s forum that may interest you.