Quote:
Tom, what benchmarks did you see for the Infrant that showed them near the top? I've only ever seen tests that show them near the bottom. In fact all SoHo NAS solutions were abysmal for speed at only a fraction of the data transfer rate of external USB or Firewire devices (even when connected via an all Gigabit path).


http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/ is one place I remember checking. For me, the benchmarks were between devices that could hold at least 4 disks, and support AFP so it narrowed the field down quite a bit. It's nowhere near direct attached speeds, but it's good enough for my environment where I want to stream media off of it, store some backups to it, and generally access it from a Wireless N Macbook Pro.

As far as the Time Machine issues, I'm hoping that will change. Earlier developer seeds worked fine over a network to pretty much anything, including Apple's own Airport Disk. All that seems to have been stripped last minute, making me think there was a potential bug there that they couldn't fix without delaying the release. The Leopard install procedure is still starting up the networking system on the machines to allow for network Time Machine restores and still includes text to indicate Airport Disk as a valid config, so this issue may be a 10.5.1 fix.