* The market for NAS devices aimed at SMBs suddenly offers real choices with a range of features.
Storage options abound in the SMB-based NAS market
By James E. Gaskin
The market for network-attached storage devices aimed at small or midsize businesses suddenly offers some real choices with a range of features. No longer are these devices just “boxes of disks” with little differentiation. Companies can choose units for size, data redundancy, innovative back-up options, a do-it-all network unit or a combination of these features.
We recently tested four devices – Anthology Solutions’ Yellow Machine (the all-in-one unit), Infrant Technologies ReadyNAS 600, Iomega’s 200d with REV drive and Netgear’s Storage Central SC101. Newcomer Infrant delivered a great product that performs well and provides a complete management utility, and wins a Clear Choice Award.
Infrant has a low public profile, but its ReadyNAS 600 box greatly impressed us. Offering several RAID options, the ReadyNAS forgoes the sleek and polished look of Buffalo Technologies’ TeraStation for a businesslike squat black box with a fan grill above the hard drive LEDs.
The ReadyNAS acts like an older-model NAS and works quite well when just plugged into the wall and connected to the network. The default settings give everyone access under standard Windows networking rules (ReadyNAS Backup and Media are preconfigured). The four 232G-byte drives in our test unit were arranged as RAID-5, which left about 650G bytes of free space (subtracting the RAID overhead and space set aside for folder Snapshots).
To read the remainder of Infrant ReadyNAS 600’s test results, as well as those of Anthology Solutions, Iomega and Netgear, see: http://www.networkworld.com/reviews/2005/102405-storage-test.html?rl
