Nexsan SATABeast

Nexsan SATABeast
Test Score: 3.1 out of 5

Editor's note: This is a summary of our testing of this product, for a full rundown of how it fared in our testing across iSCSI SAN Server categories; please see our full coverage.

The SATABeast is a 3U high chassis with 42 SATA drives, giving it the highest density of any system we tested, by far. The chassis also accommodates two controllers, providing integrated high availability.

Fundamentally, the SATABeast is a density product built for a company that really wants a lot of storage for a few servers at a reasonable price with above-average performance. However, the SATABeast is missing a number of enterprise features, such as snapshots, backups and thin provisioning, as well as some essential basic features, such as device authentication.

Combine the lack of features beyond basic iSCSI disk service with a poor initial security posture, and it's clear that the design goal for the SATABeast is an environment where ultra-high capacity is the critical requirement and everything else is less important. For example, the SATABeast can be ordered in a "Mac flavor", with a face plate matching Apple's own Xserve style, suggesting that customers with needs for huge amounts of video storage and manipulation will find the SATABeast a good option.

Nexsan's innovative power saving technology is another big plus for the product, and especially appropriate given the large number of disks included in the device. It's unlikely that a normal customer would see the 50% power savings that we saw, as that would mean that the entire array was idle, but it is great to see a company put development effort into reducing total energy consumption.

The SATABeast turned in great performance for a SATA device. We were suspicious that a single gigabit Ethernet port per controller dedicated to iSCSI traffic would do a good job, but the combination of many drives spinning at once gave the SATABeast a No. 1 ranking among SATA-based devices in 10 of 12 performance metrics.

Enterprises looking for more than a big pile of disks will find that the SATABeast won't meet their needs very well. However, if you do need maximum density and a moderate price, the SATABeast has little competition.