Seagate 4-bay NAS review: Competent workgroup storage - laneusety1965

At a Glint

Expert's Rating

Pros

Good read/write performance
SimplyRAID technology allows mixed-capacity arrays without a penalty
Dual gigabit Ethernet ports

Cons

Cannot mesh drive trays
Costly IP photographic camera licenses

Our Verdict

Solid performance, an attraction set, and Seagate's SimplyRAID technology give its 4-bay NAS a great deal for most small businesses, but the absence of locking drive trays could represent a deal circuit breaker for companies that don't have a secure location to put in it.

Seagate's new NAS line is clean and centered. Clean, as in having a minimalist, but handsome warrant and an easy-to-navigate HTML interface. Focused, as in a feature set aimed squarely at the business workgroup. It's also a second cheaper than the competition, although Seagate could make it even more soh (being a hard-drive maker and all that).

The Seagate NAS's appearance is austere in the best possible meaning of the word. Felt-black, square and flat, white LEDs, and backlit buttons sum to a very classy visual aspect. Along with just about of Synology's boxes, it's the best-looking I've seen.

The front of the unit is home to cardinal drive status/activeness indicator lights, a top executive button, and a copy button to facilitate transfers from USB media inserted into the USB 3.0 port directly underneath them.

There's another USB 3.0 port on the back, along with two ethernet ports that can embody joined for load balancing and automatic failover. The single lineament more or less might miss is the ability to lock the drive trays. They're well removed by pressing a release, then pull a lever—unchaste enough that you should support the box up a secure location.

Seagate 4-bay NAS — The absence of locking drive trays is one of the Seagate's 4-bay NAS's few flaws.

Seagate's new package features are focused on business basics: RAID, file sharing, substance abuser management, and so on. Simply support for media streaming via DLNA and iTunes servers tight consumers aren't left out. Seagate is also difficult to jump-start an application environs to further offer its capabilities.

The taking here are currently rather svelte, merely effectual: anti-virus, BitTorrent Sync, ElephantDrive backup, and WordPress content management. Additionally, ownCloud remote access augments the extant Seagate Sdrive portal-based share-out and standard HTTP/FTP remote accession.

There's also a surveillance application, which out-of-the-box supports a single camera. But Seagate is playing the same game many NAS vendors are, selling you licenses for additive cameras. And they're every bit pricey As the contender's: $70, with mild discounts in bulk. By way of equivalence: QNAP charges $55 per camera, Synology charges $66, and Iomega charges $70 for a MindTree license.

My standard advice for NAS surveillance is to skip it, unless you need exclusive one or 2 cameras. A better near is to work up your own Linux server and leverage one of the available free apps such as ZoneMinder. IT will cost much less, and you won't continually grind drives that might have something important stored on them.

Seagate's 4-bay NAS with a two-fold-core Intel Atom C2338 CPU proven to be a good performer. It wrote our 10GB mix in of files and folders at 31.6MBps, and it read the assemblage back at 87.2MBps. With a single 10GB file, its performance jumped to 35.8MBps and 110MBps severally.

We used a one-person ethernet port/connection and the four 4TB NAS HDD drives that Seagate provided set up in SimplyRAID musical mode, which enables skilled information recovery if a single drive fails. A second SimplyRAID mode enables complete data recovery if two drives bomb, but this mode requires an 8-disk array which is of course not possible with a 4-embayment enclosure.

SimplyRAID allows multiple volumes to span/share a drive off, which makes it loose to expand the array without losing data even when the array contains motley-capacity disks. Seagate's 4-bay NAS also supports RAID 1, 5, 6, and 10 as well as JBOD (sporty a bunch of drives accessed sequentially).

In short, the Seagate 4-coloured NAS is a good-looking, good-acting box offered at a competitive price.

Source: https://www.pcworld.com/article/435097/seagate-4-bay-nas-review-competent-workgroup-storage-inside-a-classy-chassis.html

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