August 29, 2007
Promise Technology Smartstor NS4300N
This is my solution for storage after I returned my Drobo. I purchased my hard drives from Global Computer. With Global you can only exchange defective drives. You may not just return them without paying additional fees. I was able to swap the Western Digital Caviar Drives for Seagate Barracuda 500GB 3gbs SATA drives.
So, since I returned the Drobo, I needed a place to put all those drives. I went searching back through my notes from my initial storage search. At this point, I knew that I wanted an empty enclosure, with a Gigabit port, a print server and at a price between $400-500. I had seen something like what I wanted on the Dell website. However, both the Intel and US Robotics product only supports SATA 150 and the drives I own are SATA-300. It seemed a waste to not have that extra transfer speed.
Along comes a Promise. I found this product with a google search. It looked like something that could be right for me. I had never heard or Promise Technologies, but felt more comfortable after doing some google research. The device met all of my requirements including SATA-300 for the drives.
The is not a product listed on Global Computer's website, but the sales rep that helped with my return said that he could order it. It was about $435.00 with shipping, so it was actually cheaper than my Drobo. I also ordered a Linksys - SD2005 Gibabit switch and a PC Gibabit adapter for my primary desktop.
The device arrived on Monday. I have to admit that the NS4300N was not as easy to install as the Drobo. You have to screw the drives into a carrier (orange things in the picture). I have never liked dealing with tiny hard drive screws. It took about 10 minutes to get the drives out of the bags and into the carriers. It went more quickly after the carriers were done. Just insert the carriers into the NS4300N, connect the ethernet cable from the NAS to the switch and plug in the power.
The NS4300N takes about a minute to wake after pushing the power button located on the front. It cycles through the lights and then gives a loud beep that says it's ready. It noticed that I am still missing one drive which should arrive from Global tomorrow.
The next step is to install the supplied NAS utility onto one of the computers. I think all of this does is initialize the drive and allow you to initially communicate to the SmartStor device. The reason I say that is that, in Windows, you just go the My Network Places and browse to the drive using it's IP address.
The NAS utility seemed to hiccup at first. It was looking for the factory default IP address for the box vs. the one assigned by the router. This was easily changed in the setup utility.
The next step was to open the Promise Advanced Storage Utility. This allows you to do more advanced NAS management. You can setup backups, email event notifications, users, workgroups, etc. I setup the email notifications, Raid 5 and enabled the USB print server. I have an HP 2600N that had been hooked into one of my older desktops and is now hooked directly to the SmartStor.
It's ALOT faster than the Drobo. It took about 3 hours to move over 276GB of data onto the unit. This was almost twice as fast as the Drobo. I don't think this is because of the Gigabit wiring because it was all still coming off a FW800 Drive. I did then same test from the earlier post with 2.5 GB of data from a connected laptop. It took 3 minutes and 20 seconds vs 12 minutes of the same data to the Drobo. So I am happy.
I have a UPS attached to the SmartStor, but I am will be running crash tests over the next few days to see how stable the unit is if the power goes out.
Overall I am happy, or will be after the crash tests, with the unit. It has a great form factor, is quiet and works as I expected. The Promise website says it will only address 3TB vs. 4TB for the Drobo, but I would not be surprised if a firmware update comes out to fix this limitation.
Posted by srivinus at August 29, 2007 11:17 PM