- Wednesday, 11 November 2009
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Seagate NASes up Black Armor
HARD-DRIVE maker Seagate has released its Black Armor 440 and 420 boxes. These are Network Attached Storage (NAS) appliances aimed at the small business market.
The price tag starts at $800 and are aimed at small office environments with up to 50 employees, as well as self-employed professionals who are looking for network-attached storage systems. They come with management utility software and backup software.
Each system is made up of a four-bay NAS device populated with Seagate-built hard disk drives.
The 420 comes with two drives in the four-drive chassis while the 440 has the bays all full. You can jam from 2-8 terabytes and hot-swap the lot.
There are four USB ports and an external power supply. The drives can be configured as a RAID array, and volumes can be encrypted.
The two-drive 2TB configuration costs $800, four-drive configuration costs $1,200 for 4TB, $1,700 for a 6TB system and $2,000 for an 8TB system. µ
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Do you mean the box contains a built-in RAID controller or merely that once I have 4 USB disks plugged into a machine I might choose to make a software RAID array?
If the box has a built-in RAID controller, then what is it, what company makes it?
Via a datasheet
"Enhance data integrity and/or performance with RAID 0/1/5/10 & JBOD configuration options."
also
"The BlackArmor NAS 420 storage server contains four drive bays, two drives are included. Three drives are need for RAID 5 and four drives are need for RAID 10."
But that's about the best I can find on their site.
Usually these things use their system processor to do the raid, that said a well optimized box can be just as fast as a good hardware raid solution just by dint of throwing enough FSB and ram at the problem.
Don't expect to see a $400 RAID adapter in a $800 NAS is all, particularly since said raid adapters are horrible overkill for the (likely load-shared) giga-lan this thing will jack into.
I have a couple of the old Intel SS4000E 4-way RAID boxes. They supported RAID 0/1/5/5+spare & JBOD. Their main use is for scratch storage for a small group of workers and the redundancy gain from either mirroring or parity. I think they have their place, though I paid a lot less than that for mine. Shame in a way that Intel don't make them anymore.