Anthology's appliance does NAS well and lots more
By James Gaskin
With capacities now reaching 1TB or higher, network-attached storage appliances may soon steal thunder in the entry-level file server market from leader Microsoft. With continued development in their operating systems, some of these NAS boxes may become the first wave of user-friendly servers for the entry level.
Based on our latest tests of five 1TB-plus NAS appliances, we think small companies with straightforward storage needs can save money and be well served by such a unit. Larger companies that need to increase their disk storage also can benefit from these systems.
Since our last test in October, storage space has increased, Gigabit Ethernet interfaces have been added (in four out of the five units tested), and USB connections are pretty much standard for the addition of printers and external disk drives. Administration utilities also have improved, making the units easier to install in most cases, and easier to manage after installation (see How we did it).
New Serial Advanced Technology Attachment (SATA) disk drives have stormed this market. Faster than older Integrated Drive Electronics (IDE) drives yet less expensive than SCSI drives, the SATA 7200 RPM drives have 8MB buffers for improved performance. The SATA drive connectors, about the size of a USB port, make it easier to cram four disks inside amazingly small enclosures.
Four of the five units tested include client backup software. All offered private user directories to encourage users to store files on the server rather than personal hard drives. Our biggest complaint was that backing up the NAS units themselves could be better addressed by some vendors.
We tested Buffalo Technology's TeraStation Pro, Infrant Technologies' ReadyNAS NV, Anthology Solutions' Yellow Machine P400T, Sabio Digital's CM-4 and Iomega's 400R. Each used RAID-5 as the default configuration, which reduced the usable disk space for several units to about 700MB (see box below). (We also tested the Maxtor 1TB OneTouch III unit.)
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