Two months ago, I wrote about the Icybox NAS-4220B Network storage unit, my first choice in the search for a set it, and forget it storage and home server solution, and if anyone’s used an Icybox before I have no doubt they’d be at least as dissappointed as I was in my few months of battle with it.  I won’t get into it again, no one likes a whinger but it was so flawed but writing everything to 1,000,000 floppy disks would probably have been a quicker, easier and more reliable solution.

Recently an oppurtunity came up to buy another NAS unit, the QNAP TS-409 Pro, from a friend at work for a good price, so after quick thought and some research (more than I had done for the Icybox!), I snapped it up.  And after a month of use, I havent regretted it.  It’s a four drive SOHO (prosumer, maybe) backup solution which currently has 4x 500GB drives in a RAID5 configuration.

The best things:

• Gigabit network connectivity (realworld gigabit, this time (20 - 40MB/s, much better than the 5 - 10MB/s from the Icybox)
• 4x SATA Bays capable of RAID0, 1, 5, 6 and JBOD configs
• Inbuilt media, iTunes, music streaming server
• Torrent/HTTP queue downloader
• NSLU2 support with iPKG management (basic linux OS with Debian like package installer).
• FTP/Samba/NFS/HTTP file access
• support for USB drives/keys and one touch/scheduled backup of core files, either from the unit itself or from locations around the local network.
• and a whole bunch of other features like web server, database, time server etc etc.

I’m especially interested in the IPKG manager and NSLU2 based linux console as it really closes the gap between useless (or limited use) network device, and fully configurable server or computer, and I’ve got a bunch of scheduled tasks UnRAR’ing downloads, backing up photos and documents, rebuilding/exporting the music collection and downloading new album artwork and doing other system and network diagnostic tasks.  Infinitely useful!

Nothings perfect though, and it can’t all be good, in the case of the QNAP, its loud as hell and building the initial RAID array took a fair few hours but that’s to be expected, and under the circumstances, I think I can let it pass.

I’m not sure what happened to me in the last six weeks, I got back from Greece and apart from a brief post a few weeks ago, I’d all but forgotten about HD911.  I seem to have been floating in some kind of bubble for the past 4-6 weeks and have forgotten all but a few responsibilities and I’m starting to go stir crazy in my own head at the boredom that i’ve created, in my head… Or something like that.

I figured I’d pick up where I left off, and give an after thought on the book I was about to read at the time called Playing for Pizza by John Grisham, and after reading the blurb on its cover, I sniggered and panned it like an arrogant film critic pans a Rob Schneider flick.  Well, shame on me for doing so, and I hate to be cliche’d, but there must be some truth in that saying, “Don’t judge a book by its cover…”

Quite frankly if there’s one author who can turn a short story about a failed NFL footballer who gets shipped off to Italy to play in their (minor) league and gets friends, a girl, a love for pizza and a championship trophy into a good story, even in my short experience in reading, I’d have to say it’d be John Grisham.

I’d love to say it’s taken me all this time to read and was a really complex story, it wasn’t, but I was interested from start to finish, and I liked not having to thnk about what I was reading.  So kudos to you, and shame on me for my quick judgement and poor form.

I’m almost 800 pages into the 1,000 page mammoth that is Shantaram Gregory David Roberts, which has kept me right on the edge of my seat since I first picked it up, until last Thursday, when I left it at the pub, moments before stumbling on to the last train home, only to pass out and wake up one stop from Windsor (yes, the place with the castle) in the lovely town of Datchet, to finally get home an hour later cost of £50 as a result of a late night cab ride from the outskirts.  But that’s a story for another day.