You got your Blu-ray drive in my NAS box!
Integrating a Blu-ray drive into a NAS box chassis is akin to mounting a rocket engine to the bed of a pickup truck: It looks impressive, but it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. So it is with LG’s N4B2ND4 NAS box (or the model N4B2N, if you don’t want the four 1TB Hitachi hard drives). The Blu-ray drive—and the drop-dead gorgeous enclosure—set the product apart from the competition, but neither feature adds sufficient value to justify the lofty price tag.
A dual-layer disc with 50GB of free space for the burnin’ is a great accessory—but not when it’s attached to a network-attached storage device. Is it an issue of backing up critical files? Well, the N4B2ND4 supports RAID 0, 1, 5, 1+0, or JBOD, which should give you plenty of options to balance your speed and data-redundancy needs. And while it’s true that a dual-layer Blu-ray disc delivers 50GB of storage capacity per disc, it would cost a small fortune to back up terabytes of data onto media that costs $35 a piece.
LG’s four-bay N4B2ND4 is big on speed and sex appeal, but it’s a major let-down on most other counts.
Is it a question of not owning a burner? Okay, but this is network-attached storage; most people will hide this 7.5-by-11.6-by-10.6-inch beast in a corner of their office or in a closet and forget about it. If you need a Blu-ray drive, it would be more useful inside your PC (or on your desktop, if you’re a notebook user). Actually, you should consider the N4B2ND4’s Blu-ray drive as a Blu-ray burner, because it will not play Blu-ray movies. That eliminates 80 percent of the justification for having any sort of Blu-ray drive at home, much less one that’s integrated into an $830 NAS box ($500 without the drives).
Leaving the Blu-ray question behind, there’s no question that the N4B2ND4 is fast. We were able to shuffle a 659MB batch of 180 files from our PC to the N4B2ND4 in a mere 12.7 seconds, while a single 2.79GB file took just 42 seconds to copy. We credit the presence of a gigabit Ethernet port and Intel’s 1.66-GHz Atom D510 dual-core processor for helping make this one of the fastest NAS boxes we’ve tested. But when it came to using these files—to stream media to an Xbox 360, a PlayStation 3, or even to a desktop PC via iTunes—the N4B2ND4 stepped up to the plate with all the power of a brain-dead zombie with a baseball bat strapped to its decaying arm.
On the bright side, even the most novice NAS newbie will find the N4B2ND4’s Web-based user interface easy to use. The digital help file is a bit crude when describing the device’s various configurations and features, but we found it easy to perform tasks such as setting up multiple share folders and locking them to different user logins, burning files to and copying them from Blu-ray discs, and taking full advantage of the included BitTorrent downloader utility to grab all the latest Linux distros. More hardcore users will appreciate being able to set up an FTP that points to the NAS box (and linking the device to a dynamic DNS address). In addition, you can enable iSCSI access with just a few clicks of the mouse. Linux users can set up NFS directories and Rsync backups/mirrors with just a few additional menus. But that’s about as fancy as the N4B2ND4 gets.
Going back to that exquisite enclosure, you’ll find three USB ports (one in front and two back); a front-mounted, four-in-one memory card reader (an unusual feature for a NAS box); and one eSATA port in the back. Installing a drive in one of the slide-in takes just seconds and doesn’t require any tools. But it takes more than a pretty face and a fast CPU to make a truly great NAS box.
