Seagate crashes the NAS party with a user-friendly dual drive solution
A while ago we covered the Seagate Central, a simple NAS box that offers a single preinstalled mechanism for basic media sharing duties. In the summer Seagate gave me a presentation of its new NAS hardware, using a totally new embedded OS, and these products have now been released into the big wide world beyond the technology press.
These two- and four-bay NAS boxes use the NAS OS 4 (embedded Linux) operating system, based on a concept that Seagate subsidiary LaCie came up with, and it serves to elevate its NAS range to the next level.
From the outside, Seagate's 2-Bay NAS has a clean and elegant design that allows the drives to be easily swapped out using tool-less plastic caddies. The review model came with two 4TB Seagate NAS HDD drives that can be configured as 4TB of failure redundant storage, or 8TB of unsecured space. Seagate sells the system as a diskless system (at about £125) or with 2TB, 4TB, 8TB and 10TB of installed drive space.
Two USB 3.0 ports provide a simple and direct means of extending this capacity even further. This can also be used for backing up the contents of the installed drives or uploading new files without occupying a PC in the transfer.
Computing power comes from an unnamed 1.2GHz ARM CPU that might be a Marvel-made dual-core chip, alongside 512MB of DDR3 RAM. However, as with any NAS configuration, it's more about how this power is being used than the total available horsepower under the hood. With this in mind, on firing up the web interface, I was initially struck by how simple Seagate has tried to keep this product - and that the interface is identical to its high-end business solutions.
Initially you have access to just five tools: Device Manager, File Browser, Download Manager, Backup Manager and App Manager. By using the last of these options you can add more functionality, should you desire, but these are early days and Seagate still has some significant work to do if it's to concern the likes of Synology in terms of its systems flexibility. Indeed, at the time of writing, there were just six apps available, which include an anti-virus package and Word Press among their ranks.
As for inherent functionality that's a much more complete story. Administrators can define users, groups, shares, quotas and all the other important parts of any file serving solution. The services user can access cover those needed by Windows PC, Unix and Mac, along with more generic capabilities like FTP, SFTP, SSH, iSCSI and UPnP/DLNA. There's also an built-in BitTorrent client, iTunes server and support for Apple Time Machine and WebDAV. While none of this is especially unique to this NAS box, it all works and includes a few services that aren't always provided. For example, a working Rsync-compatible backup service caught my eye as being a feature I'm happy to see they incorporated.
The hardware is workmanlike rather than anything spectacular, and the same is general true of the performance. Over a gigabit Ethernet link, it hit a rather low ceiling of about 50MB/S reading and 40MB writing. That's acceptable speed, even if you can get more from some competitor products. Further experimenting revealed that marginally better speed could be achieved with iSCSI connections, though most home users won't be familiar with using this technology over CIF file sharing.
Less consistent results came from using the USB 3.0 ports, which seemed pedestrian when accessed as network shares. Oddly, when these are used by the Seagate Backup Manager they show an entirely different side. I transferred 9.4GB of data to a USB 3.0 external drive in just two minutes and 16 seconds, equivalent to 70MB/S. Perhaps, eventually, Seagate can squeeze more performance out through firmware updates and improve the performance of shared external drives.
The value proposition here is an easier calculation, because the two 4TB drives that Seagate pre-installed are worth at least £130 each. That's no significant financial advantage over buying the diskless and populating it yourself, other than perhaps the warranty covering the populated device.
What the diskless model does allow is for you to buy a single drive and then increase the capacity later with a second mechanism. Those on a budget might appreciate that option, and because of that reason I'd probably recommend the diskless design over the populated ones, at this time.
With Seagate now pushing forward its NAS solutions to cover everything from entry-level to rack-mounted business solutions there are some good things in the pipeline. The 2-Bay NAS is a natural progression from the Central products to something more flexible, and we’d wager there are many users that will be interested in exactly that. Mark Pickavance
A workmanlike, low-cost NAS box for home and small office use.
Specifications:
• Model and total capacities: Two-bay: up to 10TB (2x 5TB drives).
• Form Factor Small desktop.
• CPU frequency: 1.2GHz.
• Memory: 512MB DDR3.
• Interface: Gigabit Ethernet.
• External Ports: 2x USB 3.0, 1x 10/100/1000 Base-TX.
• Hot-swappable HDD trays.
• Physical Dimensions L/W/D: 120mm x 217mm x 172.5mm.
• Weight: 3.385 kg (drives installed).
• Power Consumption:
- Operation mode: 16W.
- Power-saving mode: 7W.
- WOL mode: 0.55W.
• Operating system: NAS OS 4 (embedded Linux).
• Warranty: three-year.