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Acer easyStore H340

Norman Chan — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 20:15:45 -0500

Ample thrills with minimal frills

Acer’s entry-level easyStore H340 gives you everything you need to attach a robust Windows Home Server to your network, with plenty of room to expand. Its technical specs edge out HP’s comparably-priced LX195—both are budget servers equipped with a 1.6GHz Atom processor, but the H340 includes 2GB of RAM and 1TB of included disk storage. The feature that really sets Acer’s offering apart, however, is the availability of four hot-swappable drive bays, meaning you can add three additional 3.5-inch SATA drives with ease. And if those aren’t enough, the H340 also has five powered USB ports and even an eSATA port for you to go nuts with expansions.

Sweet hardware aside, the software bundled with the H340 is pretty basic. Included server Add-ins provide compatibility for DLNA (Digital Living Network Alliance) supported hardware and iTunes library sharing, but the Lights Out power management Add-in is something you can freely download for any WHS build. You also get six months of McAfee virus protection for your server, but this is a service that you can’t uninstall from the WHS console—you’ll have to use Remote Desktop to manually remove it.

One other notable feature is a one-touch USB backup button. Plug any USB hard drive into the front of the server, push the button, and the H340 automatically copies all of the files into the Public Shared Folder. It’ll also sort the files based on file type, distributing them into music, video, and photo folders. We found this to be a really quick and efficient way to back up the myriad USB keys found lying around at home. As a starter package, the Acer H340 is great for power users who want a home server without building their own.

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HP MediaSmart LX195

HP MediaSmart LX195

Norman Chan — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 20:05:36 -0500

A pint-size home server for your budding network

If you don’t need terabytes of backup space for your network, the newest member of HP’s MediaSmart family may be the right fit for you. With 640GB of storage, the LX195 makes sense if your home network consists of just two or three PCs. Like its higher-end siblings, the LX195 lets you perform Mac OS backups, though you’ll have to partition additional drive space for Time Machine. Storage capacity is the LX195’s big weakness, since there are no extra internal drive bays or eSATA ports for additional hard drives. To enable WHS’s file duplication feature or add additional storage space, you’ll have to attach external drives with USB.

The LX195’s strengths lie in its small size and low power usage. It’s no bigger than a desktop speaker, and can be hidden out of sight under your desk. Its Atom processor draws very little power (especially when idle), and we couldn’t even hear the server operate during backups.

Serving high-definition WMV files to our Xbox 360 worked without hiccups on a wired network, but don’t expect to transcode high-bitrate video with the meager 1.6GHz Atom CPU and 1GB of memory. However, serving content to multiple machines simultaneously is fast with the included Twonky streaming software—an HP-exclusive Add-in for now. File transfer speeds were a little faster than other entry-level home servers, but were noticeably slower than our custom-built WHS rig.

At the listed price of $400 ($300 on Newegg), the LX195 is a little pricey given its limited upgrade options. It’s a suitable solution if you use both PCs and Macs and don’t plan on greatly expanding your home network.

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Acer easyStore H340

Seagate BlackArmor NAS 440

Nathan Edwards — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 12:00:01 -0500

A whole lotta NAS for a whole lotta dough

Last month we reviewed Western Digital’s MyBook World Edition, a small, white, single-drive, one-terabyte NAS box aimed solidly at Joe User. This month, we have the Seagate BlackArmor NAS 440, the MyBook’s polar opposite in many ways. It’s big, it’s black, it’s user-serviceable, comes with four Barracuda 7200.11 1.5TB drives, and is marketed toward small businesses without a dedicated IT staff.

The BlackArmor 440 is a brick, the front of which has a two-line green LCD status screen, a front door that opens to reveal the four hot-swappable screwless drive bays, one of the box’s four USB 2.0 host ports, and a power button. The back holds the 12cm exhaust fan, the power jack (for the external power brick), two Gigabit Ethernet ports, and the other three USB 2.0 ports.

The LCD display offers system status information and a few buttons to navigate with, but the real power comes from the BlackArmor’s web interface, which is easily accessible from the BlackArmor Discovery software included with the NAS. The Discovery software also provides easy mapping of shared folders—the defaults are Public and Downloads.

The BlackArmor 440 is probably more NAS than a home network needs.

Via the web interface, admins can configure users’ quotas and permissions (including who can access the devices on each USB port); set up email alerts; set up, manage, and monitor the SMART status of drives and volumes; and turn on iTunes and media sharing and global access. Other options include FTP, HTTPS access (using your own SSL certificates or ones generated by the NAS), CIFS, NFS, Bonjour, and more.

One interesting feature is the ability to create multiple RAID arrays on the same drives. It’s a neat trick, but most users should stick with the single RAID 5 volume the 440 comes with.

One of the BlackArmor’s most useful inclusions is the BlackArmor Backup service, a custom app by Acronis. The 440 includes 10 full-version licenses, and more can be acquired from Seagate. For small-office users, that’s a lot of value.

In its default RAID 5 configuration, using one Gigabit Ethernet port, the 440 transfers files quickly. Copying a 2.79GB file from the NAS to a PC on the local network took two minutes and 38 seconds, while writing that file to the NAS took just over a minute. Connecting the other Ethernet port increases transfer speeds, but that port can also be used to make NAS-to-NAS backups or server backups.

After a week of testing, one of the 1.5TB drives in our review unit failed, so we got an opportunity to see the 440’s recovery process in action. The LCD screen and the web management panel both displayed alerts, and the RAID 5 was still functional, though degraded.

To rebuild the array, all we did was eject and replace the faulty drive. From there, it was a matter of three or four mouse clicks before the RAID 5 array was recovering itself in the background. Rebuilding a 4.5TB array takes a long time, so we were pleased that we could still use the volume normally during the process.

The Seagate BlackArmor 440 is a powerful NAS with a huge array of business-oriented features. In fact, it’s almost certainly overkill for home users, unless you have a large home network. After all, it’s eight times the price of the consumer-friendly MyBook World 1TB. But with its enormous capacity and wealth of features, it would make a very useful addition to a small office network.

Qnap TS-209 Pro II

David Murphy — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 15:08:40 -0500

Based on the name alone, one would expect Qnap’s TS-209 Pro II NAS box to offer more features than its predecessors—particularly our leader in this storage category, Qnap’s TS-109 Pro. And while the former does allow for increased capacity, it does not provide significant improvements in performance or offer more features than the TS-109 Pro, which has been out for more than a year.

The TS-209 Pro II differs from the TS-109 Pro in two fundamental ways: First, the TS-209 Pro II is a two-bay device that only requires you to remove a faceplate to access the hot-swap drive bays, a much simpler process than the disassembly required to stick a new drive in the single-bay TS-109 Pro. Second, the TS-209 Pro II sports 256MB of internal DDR II RAM, double the internal memory of the TS-109 Pro.

We assumed—perhaps incorrectly—that this additional memory would do something, anything, for the TS-209 Pro II’s benchmark performance. It does not. In fact, even after we added a speedy Velociraptor drive to the unit to eliminate any kind of hard drive bottleneck, the TS-209 Pro II was still unable to top the TS-109 Pro in any benchmark. The TS-209 Pro II took an extra 18 seconds to transfer 659MB (180 files) from our computer to our NAS in our small-file test. In our large-file test, the TS-209 Pro II took more than a minute longer than the TS-109 Pro to transfer a single 2.79-gigabyte file.

The TS-209 Pro II is fast when compared against the entire category of NAS devices. But it’s not faster than our speed champion, the TS-109 Pro. Nor do any compelling features push it above and beyond its predecessor. The latest firmware update to the TS-109 Pro gives that device the same features and options as the TS-209 Pro II, including a BitTorrent downloading application, a networked webcam surveillance application, and an iTunes streaming service. The TS-209 Pro II differs only in its RAID offerings, due to its support for two hard drives versus the TS-109 Pro’s one.

We dislike that the TS-209 Pro II drops the eSATA connection that was included with the TS-109 Pro. It’s not a mission-critical deletion, but we’d still much prefer to back up the contents of our NAS box over a speedy SATA connection rather than USB. It would also be nice to have a friendlier hot-swap setup in the front of the TS-209 Pro II. Removing the front bezel doesn’t pain us, but in a perfect world, we'd be able to insert drive without having to take anything off of the device first.

The TS-209 Pro II is a fast product with a bounty of features beyond what we typically see in NAS products, it’s just not among the speediest NAS devices we’ve tested. If you don’t need the increased storage that a second drive bay brings, you’re better off purchasing one of the company’s faster single-drive options—like the TS-109 Pro.

Qnap TS-409 Pro

David Murphy — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 17:50:09 -0500

Is bigger always better? Not necessarily. Qnap’s TS-409 Pro is packed with the same features as the company’s TS-109 Pro but includes twice as much memory and supports four hard drives rather than just one. And it rocks, but only if we compare it to similarly sized foes, such Buffalo’s four-drive TeraStation Live.

The TS-409 Pro doesn't include any additional connections over the TS-109 Pro. In fact, you lose an eSATA port.

The TS-409 Pro is the fastest multiple-drive NAS box we’ve tested, producing excellent scores in our read and write benchmarks. But the same can’t be said when we expand the field to include single-drive NAS devices.

Qnap’s own TS-109 Pro overtakes the TS-409 Pro in half of our transfer benchmarks. We didn’t expect this since the hardware in the two products is almost identical. If anything, the TS-409 Pro should trounce its predecessor, thanks to an additional 128MB of onboard DDR2 memory.

It’s no surprise that the devices’ administration software is also nearly identical. However, since it supports multiple drives, the TS-409 allows you to configure RAID levels; other additions include support for hard-drive SMART statistics and a new way to schedule backups to connected USB devices. We would have liked even more improvements, such as a more streamlined interface for easier use, a better downloading application, and a one-button approach for backing up one internal drive to another.

Qnap downgrades the NAS experience by stripping functionality out of the TS-109 Pro and packaging these features into external software applications for the TS-409 Pro. You now manage FTP, HTTP, and BitTorrent downloads using the QGet program. We’d much prefer a client with the functionality of Azureus or uTorrent—QGet lacks scheduling and tweaking options.

The included Netback Replicator is a great one-click backup application but a poor synchronization app since it goes only one way: You can’t sync a folder on the TS-409 Pro to your computer. The program only copies files you dump into a folder on your machine to a folder of your choice on the TS-409 Pro.

The TS-409 Pro is the best multi-drive NAS box we’ve tested, but that doesn’t mean it’s perfect. Since Qnap is upgrading all of its other NAS devices, it might be worth waiting to see if the company spruces up this one as well.

HP Media Vault mv2010

David Murphy — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 14:00:10 -0500

HP’s Media Vault is like a clumsy, fat version of HP’s star-quarterbacking, marathon-running, leather-jacket-wearing MediaSmart Home Server. And that’s saying something, considering the MediaSmart EX475 is something of a middling performer. We can’t fault HP for trying to make a cheaper, simpler alternative to the Windows Home Server-based MediaSmart, but we’re certainly ready to take the company to task for releasing a product that doesn’t work as advertised.

The Media Vault should be called the Molasses Vault, as network transfers are akin to a sticky liquid traveling down an incline on a cold winter day. We’ve tested worse-performing NAS devices, but the Media Vault’s transfer speeds are nowhere near those of the top-performing QNAP TS-109 Pro. This makes the Media Vault a poor choice for backup scenarios, which could very well take more than 12 hours for a full 300GB drive.

The Media Vault comes in 300GB, 500GB, and 1TB models. HP sent us the smallest Media Vault for our review, and it simply isn’t large enough for a network-based device. You can increase its capacity by adding an additional drive to the device’s hot-swap drive bay. That’s if you don’t mind adding to your total purchase price, of course.

It’s possible for a product to balance sluggish speeds with jaw-dropping features, and the Media Vault comes close. Its built-in NTI backup software should become a staple of every external storage device created from this point forward—it’s just that straightforward an app, and it simplifies the process of backing up specific files and entire hard drives.

Setting up the Media Vault is as easy as transferring various bits and pieces of media to the device—a simple drag-and-drop in Windows Explorer. You don’t have to go network hunting to find the Media Vault since the included software maps the Media Vault’s various volumes as network drives. This is a far cry from other NAS devices we’ve tested, which practically require one to acquire a map, a parrot, and a sailing vessel to find shared folders.

As for its streaming capabilities, the Media Vault is incompatible with Windows Media Player 11 and the Xbox 360. And we’re not sure who to point our finger at—the Media Vault’s streaming technology is based on UPnP A/V. An Xbox 360 should be able to see the Media Vault on the network as if it were a normal Vista machine and play media files accordingly. It doesn’t. Neither does Windows Media Player 11, which, according to HP is a Media Player issue. HP offers a fix, but it is just a way to set up monitored folders, not a means of accessing the device as if it were a networked computer’s library.

The TS-109 Pro and other NAS devices we’ve tested are fully compatible with WMP 11 and the Xbox 360, so we’re not asking for the impossible when it comes to streaming compatibility. However, it’s not as if the Media Vault is completely incapable of streaming media—you can still browse and watch your media via Windows Explorer, which is a small consolation, we suppose. (See this month’s In the Lab for more on this issue.)

We remain at a loss as to what to do with a media server that doesn’t stream. We’d be consoled if the Media Vault were awesome for file backups, but its amazing software simply can’t compensate for the device’s subpar speeds. One can only hope that subsequent iterations in the Media Vault line address the issues of this good-on-paper, subpar-in-practice device.

Buffalo TeraStation Live

David Murphy — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 18:30:30 -0600

Our little hearts were ablaze with excitement when we busted open the chunky Buffalo TeraStation Live. And with good reason; on paper, the four-drive NAS device looked like it was going to be an easy winner–its two terabytes of total storage in a RAID-5 configuration made us smile.

As it turns out, we celebrated prematurely. The Buffalo TeraStation Live performs about as well in a file transfer test as it would in a foot race. Surprisingly, it was the only NAS device of the four tested here that had slower read times than write times. At 5:16 (min:sec) to transfer a 3GB file from the NAS to a PC, you’ll be in for a bit of a wait should you decide to use this device as a media hub–you might as well put in a vacation notice at work if you’re copying two terabytes’ worth of data.

Write speeds were marginally better but still not fast enough to catapult the TeraStation Live to the front of the file-transfer footrace. That said, the TeraStation Live offsets the pain by packing a few neat features into this otherwise plain-Jane device. We love the device’s user-management settings—a handy web interface makes it easy to add new users, assign users to groups, and control file-access operations.

Also handy is the TeraStation Live’s built-in media server feature. We were able to pull up a shared batch of MP3s on iTunes with no problems whatsoever. But this rounds out the feature list for this NAS device. Nothing distances Buffalo’s NAS box from its competitors in terms of features, which forces us to rely on its slow transfer speeds for an overall verdict. We’d recommend the TeraStation Live for its data redundancy and ease-of-use, but like this device, we simply run out of steam for further praise.

HP MediaSmart EX475

Will Smith — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 18:23:46 -0600

We’re going to get this out of the way up front. If you’re looking for raw speed, the MediaSmart isn’t for you. We’ve tested faster NAS boxes, but we’ve never tested a network storage device that delivers the same level of functionality as this little Windows Home Server-based wonder.

The svelte hardware looks more at home on your bookshelf than a server rack, and it’s virtually silent. Based on its hardware specs, the EX475 appears to be either a supercharged NAS box or an underpowered server. With a 1.8GHz single-core Sempron processor, 512MB of RAM, and two 512GB drives, it straddles the server/NAS box line. We wouldn’t have minded seeing larger drives, but with two free tool-less drive bays, adding more storage takes seconds. This rig isn’t about hardware but rather the delicious software inside.

HP started with the basic Home Server package (reviewed January 2008). With automatic system backups, centralized music/photo/video sharing, and the ability to share your files remotely, Home Server is a win. But HP took the experience a step further, including an iTunes server along with a fully featured photo-sharing suite. When you factor in these new changes with the handful of eminently useful plugins available, you’ve got an extremely powerful device that could serve multiple uses inside any home.

We’d hoped to see slightly better performance from the MediaSmart, but given its low price, we’re willing to make some allowances. Compared to a stand-alone Home Server rig sporting an Athlon X2 4800 CPU with 2GB of RAM, the MediaSmart took almost twice as long to complete large file transfers. The small-file transfer test took 32 seconds longer. Of course, the lower-powered MediaSmart draws less power every month than our full-size box. You have to decide whether speed or power is more important to you.