| Article Index |
|---|
| Intel SS4200-E NAS Review |
| Internals and Functionality |
| USB and eSATA Peripherals |
| Performance |
| Is the SS4200 For Me?} |
| Conclusion and Thoughts |
| All Pages |
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
-
|118.90.90.xxx |2009-05-03 09:39:38 Andrew Watson - Thanks for the heads up on the firmwareI 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.
-
|71.252.47.xxx |2010-01-09 14:52:57 F32 - Killer with WHSThese 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!
