Intel SS4200-E NAS Review

Today I take a detailed look at Intel's most affordable NAS device, the SS4200-E. Intel's Product Page for the SS4200-E reports that this is a storage device aimed at the SOHO and Small Business markets, a market that we might ordinarily categorise as being from 1 computer up to about 15 or 20 computers.

These types of networks often do not have significant demands for truly fast storage - unlike larger network environments where the device is doing many things at the same time and responding quickly is the only way to ensure the device is not overloaded, small business environments often have only 1 computer accessing the device at the same time.

As a result, it seems that many small and cheap NAS devices are built to be "OK" for a single user, and struggle to be classed merely as "atrocious" when 2 or 3 people try to do things at the same time.

Let's take a look at the specifications on our lab device.

The two specs that really jump out at me are the CPU and the RAM. It may not sound like much to the gamer with the water cooled overclocked quad core monster PC, but a 1.6GHz Celeron is so much more capable than a lot of the cheap consumer NAS devices out there. As recently as 2 years ago I was handed a 4 disk NAS with a 200MHz custom processor that could manage only 5MB per second, yet was touted as being state of the art. 512MB of RAM is also decidedly beefy for a consumer NAS, and the combination of these two items promises performance that might, just maybe, exceed a single hard disk from ten years ago.

The SS4200 has an unusual layout. Most NAS devices will have a tiny custom motherboard with the disks stacked on top of each other, to save space. The SS4200 is effectively two distinct layers. The bottom layer is the power supply and motherboard, and the top layer is the four disks. This makes the Intel NAS quite large - certainly larger than most comparable devices.

From the top we see both disk trays in the normal position:

Gently lift up the tray marked "3" and "4" and we see the motherboard:

While lifting the tray with disks 1 and 2 shows the power supply and cabling:

Installation of the drives is a snap, with Intel providing custom screws with a three dimensional plastic head. This allows the disks to be placed inside a frame and a clamp applied to the frame over the screws - secure but quiet fast to service and less fiddly than many drive trays.

The custom screws are circled in red in this photo - quite an unusual design. They screw directly into the standard holes for a 3.5" drive:

Unfortunately, the cabling for my unit was upside down and I needed to cut the cable ties to allow the power cables to connect to the drives. This may not be the case for yours.

The firmware delivered with the SS4200 gave me the ability to store files using Windows file sharing (SMB or CIFS for the technically inclined). This was a bit of a surprise as the unit appears to be based on a Linux kernel. A firmware upgrade was required to enable Network File Sharing (NFS) for Linux clients. The problem with the upgrade is that the unit happily reported that it was completely up to date - the new firmware had to be manually located on the Intel website.

Manually downloading and installing the firmware from the Intel site was successful first time around, although I had to use Internet Explorer to perform the update - in Firefox the javascript .web page complained that the file did not exist.

Strangely enough, the new firmware (version 1.1.11.32736) also addressed one of the initial criticisms of the unit when it was powered up for the first time. Despite numerous cries of "Cool" (from the guys) and "Pretty" (from the girls) at the sight of the 7 bright blue LEDs on the front of the unit, it was quickly observed that the LEDs are high intensity LEDs - and bright doesn't begin to describe them.

The new firmware gave me the option of setting the LEDs to three levels of brightness. The default level (as delivered) is characterised as "High" brightness. The lowest level, "Low", is dim even in a darkened room, making the NAS suitable for home theatre environments. The "Medium" setting is just about in the middle.

The SS4200 supports the attachment of USB disk drives, cameras, bluetooth adapters and UPS. However, not every attempt to attach or use devices was as smooth or successful as it might have been.

First I tried attaching a USB memory key and while installation was immediate and successful, the memory key was less functional than I had idealized. For example, there was no way to tell the SS4200 to copy the files on the key to the RAID set, unless they were picture (image) files from a digital camera. This meant there was no way to plug in a USB key and easily back up the contents directly to the NAS. If this were available in the Web Console as an option - "Copy USB key to Folder" - it would have been a great option

Instead, I had to access the USB key across the network - and the Share name that the SS4200 selected was neither obvious nor memorable. My USB key showed up with the share name "USB?USB?2.0?Flash?Disk?part1" - and there's no way to change it. Perhaps a name like "USBKey1" would have been more easy to manage.

Next I attached a 1TB Seagate FreeAgent Desktop USB disk to the NAS. Again, the installation was successful and immediate - the storage appeared as a new share within seconds. But the same types of issues occurred. With a 1TB disk, it might be expected that the NAS could be instructed to back up (copy) a portion of itself to the USB drive, or vuce versa, but unfortunately this was not possible. Again the only method of access was through a share, this time named, "USB?Seagate?FreeAgentDesktop?part1".

Performance of the USB disk was quite poor at about 5 megabytes per second - about 1/6 the performance of the same disk when attached to a PC running Windows Vista.

Lastly I plugged in a PowerWare 5110 UPS, so that I could enable Write Caching on the NAS for better performance. The PowerWare UPS is a 300VA unit, capable of supporting about 210W of computer equipment. Unfortunately the SS4200 did not recognise the UPS as a UPS, so I could not test whether write caching did, in fact, get enabled automatically. The write cache tests were therefore conducted with the unit "forced" into caching mode.

I was not able to test the USB Bluetooth or USB Printer functionality.

I ran a series of performance tests to see how the unit performs in various scenarios. The test system is as follows:

• Intel SS4200-E NAS
• 4 x Western Digital WD10EACS disks - 1.0TB, 5400RPM
• System connected to a Netgear 8 port Gb switch

One thing I noticed was that prior to a copy "getting started" there was a delay where no network traffic was seen in either direction - behaviour I have not seen from the test toolset previously. I confirmed by testing the same operations against another server running Windows Server 2003 x64, and the initial pauses were not present, so there appears to be something related to the NAS that causes operations on large files to take 5-10 seconds to begin. This delay occurred only with the internal disks and not with USB devices.

All the single-direction tests were conducted using both FTP and the SMB (Windows Networking) protocol. Results varied by a few percent - nothing significant varied between different runs of the test nor different protocols. The bi-directional tests were conducted using SMB only.

The following tests were all conducted with data flowing primarily in one direction - either to or from the NAS, not both at the same time:

The following tests were conducted using the NAS as both the origin and the destination. This means that the disks in the NAS will be seeking back and forth, so this is one possible "worst case" scenario.

Performance for this unit is definitely better than many of the NAS units I've used in the past. Every single number posted by the Intel NAS beat out a unit that cost 5 times as much just 2 years ago - in fact that particular device topped out at 5 megabytes per second in every single configuration I tried - and the Intel NAS was always more than triple that performance.

Interestingly, the best performance in the stress test was obtained using RAID 5 instead of RAID 10. This was quite surprising - more often than not, RAID 10 on the same number of disks is faster in the second series of tests because the system can alternate the disks used for reading and writing. Specifically, the RAID 10 set performed faster for reading data than the RAID 5; and should also have been faster in the stress test (NAS to NAS).

Now that I've seen what the SS4200 is capable of, I can safely say where the SS4200 is best suited.

Overall I'm pretty impressed with the Intel SS4200. The functionality is good, and better with the most recent firmware, which resolved two very important issues. Performance was also better than expected, although there's still room for improvement on the posted numbers, they are certainly acceptable for home and SOHO use by several users at the same time.

There were one or two rough edges however.

The performance of the NAS didn't improve as much as I thought it could have with the change from RAID 5 to RAID 10. RAID 5 performance on small writes can often be affected by the need to recalculate the parity for the stripe, while RAID 10 is just a case of simply writing the same data to the same place on two disks. Unfortunately, the NAS is quite severely locked down - the only administration method I could find in the limited time I had to evaluate this device was the web UI which, while functional, does not provide any insights into the performance of the device. It would have been nice to be able to use SSH to access a console and potentially discover what was limiting performance - though my guess would be the chipset, I really have no concrete evidence other than the expectation that the CPU can handle more than 30MB of data per second.

Also, the RAID level of the device cannot be changed without first removing all the data. While converting from a RAID 5 to a RAID 10 means losing disk space, going the other way can be done without wiping the disks. It would be nice to see this capability in a future update. And since changing the RAID level took anywhere from 9 to 20 hours, the entire process including backup and restore of the NAS could easily take 2 or 3 days to finish.

All in all, this is probably the best NAS I've seen for functionality and performance outside the large enterprise NAS devices (which are usually high powered servers).

Overall, in its target market (home and SOHO users), the SS4200 scores 9 out of 10.

The Intel SS4200-E is available from TechBuy:

• As a bare unit:
  The Intel SS4200-E - $569.00
• As a package deal with 4 x Western Digital 1.0TB 5400 rpm Drives (as reviewed):
  The Intel SS4200-E 4TB EcoGreen - $1367.30
• As a package deal with 4 x Western Digital 1.0TB 7200 rpm Drives:
  The Intel SS4200-E 4TB Black Label - $1466.30
• As a package deal with 4 x Western Digital 1.0TB Drives and a matching UPS:
  The Intel SS4200-E 4TB Small Business - $1916.60

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Comments (2)

• |118.90.90.xxx |2009-05-03 09:39:38 Andrew Watson  - Thanks for the heads up on the firmware
  I have been using one at home for about 5 months and find it excellent (I mainly use it for media and downloads). Thanks for the informative review (I wouldn't have known about the new firrmware otherwise). I do wish it had a squeezebox compatible music server. Apart from that it has been faultless and fast enough to not notice as an external disk.
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• |71.252.47.xxx |2010-01-09 14:52:57 F32  - Killer with WHS
  These sell for as low as $170 on newegg and $140 on ebay and are absolutely KILLER with WHS. If you get one one ebay and add $100 WHS it is $210 and every one of your shortcomings is addressed and it makes the HP WHS line, even discounted models, look terrible.
  Google the ss4200 and WHS, installing it is easy you don't need a video card you just image a $5 2gb usb memory stick. You can even then use the ide port for a fifth ide drive!
  
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