With my desire to get more agile in my life and with my photography, I have made a command decision to move to a single laptop for my work. Whether that’s this machine (MacBook) or a different one (MacBook Pro) is still undetermined.

What is a fact though is that my Quad G5 will be hitting the bricks. There’s no question about it, that kind of power is wonderful and amazing, but my utilization of anything coming close to a small percentage of the box’s capabilities is looooowwww. That machine did the heavy lifiting, which appears to be doable on one of the laptops mentioned above, but the other thing that the Quad gives me is an always on presence on my network, which allows Darla to get to photos all the time, whether I’m here or not. This is hosted on my WD 1TB RAID unit, connected via Firewire800.

Now, I could take the RAID, and hang it off the MacMini that serves up my sites, but that machine isn’t Gig-E, and frankly, I don’t know that I want a public facing machine being used as a home for my primary backup location. That leaves me with NAS RAID arrays for protecting and delivering the important stuff that mark the days of my life — photos, videos, music.

I’ve been reading several folks blog entries — notably Scot Hacker’s Foobar Blog, which details a nice solution, and Dive Into Mark, which really details the crux of the problem — and it seems that all signs point to an Infrant ReadyNas device, probably the NV or NV+. I still haven’t quite figured out the difference between the two devices, but I think the right answer is gonna look a lot like one of these devices, bare-boned, and filled with drives of my own choosing.

Watch this space for news on this front. I expect it’ll be weeks until the final chapter is written, but once it is, I’m sure it’ll be a cool story!