I’ve been happy with the ReadyNAS, and performance has been fairly good since I upgraded the Gigabit switch that I use.  However, over the past two years, my storage needs have grown:

• iMac 27″: 2 TB drive for documents / applications / photos, 2 TB drive for iTunes, 2 TB for Time Machine
• Macbook: 250GB main drive

The ReadyNAS has 4 750GB drives, providing 2.25 TB of available storage.  At the time I deployed it, my backup needs were about 1 TB, so I could use the drive for backups and incremental updates.

The problem now is the iTunes drive.  It’s too large to backup effectively with Time Machine.  I’ve been using Carbon Copy Cloner to update a disk image of the drive on a weekly basis, but I’ve found that it’s extremely finicky and errors out in a number of situations.  Plus, at 1.6TB, the iTunes library will likely outgrow it’s 2TB home sometime in 2010.  (If you’ve ever purchased a TV season on iTunes, you’ll understand the storage needs).

In order to figure this out, I tried asking the question on Quora, LinkedIn, and Twitter.

• Twitter got me no answers whatsoever.  Very disappointing.
• Quora got me no answers for weeks, although one trickled in almost a month later.
• LinkedIn was the clear winner, and even I was surprised at the speed and quality of the responses.

So, I decided to make the big move to upgrade the system.  Looking at prices on NewEgg, I decided to opt for the Western Digital WD15EARS SATA 1.5TB drives.  Low power and 64MB of cache.  $109 each.  (Great price – selling the 750GB drives will likely pay for 25% of the upgrade).

Unfortunately, the drive wasn’t listed on the compatibility page on NetGear’s website.  Fortunately, a quick board question provided me with the info I needed – the drives will work, if I upgrade to the new beta firmware (4.1.7 T29).

So that’s what I’m doing tonight:

• Upgrade firmware
• One-by-one replace each 750GB drive with a 1.5TB and let it resync
• Once all four drives are replace and synched, reboot and let it reconfigure to the 4.5 TB logical size.

Once I get the ReadyNAS NV+ to 4.5 TB, I’m going to move my iTunes library to the ReadyNAS.  This way, it can scale easily to more than 2 TB, and I don’t have to worry about backup because of the RAID configuration.  (I have a clone of most of the library on a Mac Mini in the kitchen.)  I will then move the 2 TB drive that currently houses the iTunes library, and move it to the Airport Extreme hub so I can use it as a Time Machine drive for the MacBook.

I’m not sure this information is actually useful to anyone.  My guess is that someone, somewhere out there will want to know that you can, in fact, upgrade the Infrant ReadyNAS NV+ to more than 4TB, and that you can use the Western Digital DV15EARS 1.5TB drives with it.  And maybe, just maybe, someone out there is morbidly curious about the evolution of my network storage.

Or so I hope.  I’ll update this post if anything goes wrong.

I think the news that Apple sold 1 million iPhones in 3 days and is now the Number 3 PC Maker in the United States confirmed this for me.  As an Apple user since the early 1980s and a former employee, it’s just too hard to believe that the universe of maximum probability includes Apple’s exponential success in the past five years.

Honestly, doesn’t it seem like the most likely future for the computer industry in the 1990s was Bill Gates launching a mobile computer with sales of 1 million units in 3 days, and Steve Jobs taking a full time role in philanthropy?

Think about it.  I’m guessing the date of cross over was sometime in 2000, right around the time where Apple launched an MP3 player that cost around 300% more than the average player, and yet achieved over 70% market share in just 2 years.

The question is… what other improbable events exist in this variant of the universe?

Then this forum discussion popped up, and pointed me to a very cool solution that I had to share.

Basically, you can do it with Quicktime Pro, but only if you download this free extension to Quicktime that adds support for a large number of video formats.

The magic free extension, which is distributed as a System Preference panel file, is called Perian, the Swiss Army Knife for Quicktime. Quick download, mount disk image, double-click on preference panel file, and you are ready to convert.

Once you have Perian, you just open the MKV file with Quicktime, and export it to either MP4 (with specific settings), or use the AppleTV or iPod export settings.  That’s it, really.

This blog had a wonderful, detailed step-by-step process, with screenshots.  I found it invaluable.

Hope this helps.  The only downside to this is that it really is only practical for MKV files out there that already use H.264 for encoding, and that have settings compatible with iTunes.  So far, I’m finding that most do, but your mileage may vary. Also, it takes Quicktime Pro about 30 minutes to convert a 2 minute movie on my PowerMac G5, Dual-2.5Ghz.  So this isn’t really practical with full length pictures unless you are willing to leave it running for hours.

Let me know if you have a better solution.

Update (10/5/2008): The blog that had the instructions is now gone.  There is a new solution posted on tehparadox.com.

Update (12/13/2008): Thanks to the comment below for a pointer to MKVTools 2.1.  Looks like a new alternative for MKV to MP4 without re-encoding.

Update (01/04/2009): Stop everything.  There is a much better solution now.  Handbrake 0.93 lets you specify an MKV file as a source, and then lets you convert to a variety of outputs.  I’m not sure if it introduces any unnecessary compression, but given Handbrake’s reputation, I’d be surprised if they re-encoded when not necessary.  Check it out and post here if you have issues.

Update (11/27/2009): Handbrake 0.9.4 is now out, and it handles MKV to MP4 translation flawlessly.  I highly recommend it.  No other solution comes close for ease of use or quality.  And it’s free.