slam_to's Full Review: Promise SmartStorâ„¢ NS4300N Network Storage Serve...
This NAS is pretty good for the money, it's probably the cheapest NAS available. However it does have a few problems, these may or may not be show-stoppers for you.
Right out of the box the NAS worked (firmware version was: 01.03.0000.06). Setup with Windows sharing was quick. I also have it shared over SMB to my Macs. If you know how to find it's IP address, you don't need to install their setup utility since it comes with a fairly intuitive web page interface.
Plastic mounting rails make for easy drive installs and swapping. The Gig-E compatible port is nice, and works. The throughput of the RAID isn't blazingly fast, on a RAID-1 or RAID-5 configuration.
For transfer speeds I saw anywhere from 7-20 MB/s, typically 12 MB/s. This varied from transfering one file to multiple computers accessing files from the NAS.
I tested it's error recovery and it performs perfectly. I tested pulling out a hard drive hot, and inserting a new one. It warns you that the RAID is critical, and then starts rebuilding when you put the new drive in. The RAID is still fully accessible during all of this.
The shortcomings?
File deletion surprisingly takes a very long time! I talking about 10-30 seconds for file to be deleted. I tested trying to delete 750 files (around 700 gigs), it took 2.5 hours!!!
As mentioned before, the transfer speed off the RAID is not very fast. More expensive NAS's get easily double the speed.
The fan noise isn't that quiet either, this may be an issue if you want to put the NAS in the same room as your TV or home theater set up.
If I nit-pick:
You can only create one massive RAID volume on a set of physical drives. There is no option of creating logical disc partitions.
On Promise's PCI RAID controllers, it was possible to create multiple logical drives with different RAID configurations on the same set of physical drives. This NAS is unable to do so, but it really isn't a huge issue.
Another problem I've seen is the NS4300N isn't even compatible with RAID formatting of their own RAID PCI controllers. It was nice to have the option that if one of my PCI controllers died, I could move the drives from one RAID to the other and recover the files. Not so with the NS4300N. If you put in a hard drive set with multiple RAID volumes, the NS4300N will lose it's marbles in a very, very bad way.
The bad.
It's mostly all plastic, if you break one of those hard drive you have to get a new one. The drives can't be inserted without them. One odd issue is you still have to screw the drive (with 4 screws) to these quick insert/release rails. It's not that quick. When most computer cases these days have quick release rails for HD's, I'm surprised Promise went with screws for this product.
The plastic casing is very thin.
Promise's tech support does not understand their own products. Most of the information I've been given about this product was incorrect, and wrong. If you're not experienced with networking or RAID configuration, you will have to learn on your own without the benefit of tech support.
The summary:
If you want an inexpensive NAS for your home or office, then this is probably the product for you. If you're pushing the limits of storage and bandwidth, spend more money and look elsewhere.
Support up to four hot-swappable SATA 3Gb s hard drives, NS4300N allows you to expand capacity as your needs grow at the lowest incremental cost. Comp...More at eBay
The Promise Technology, the worldwide leader in SAS/SATA RAID, brings its proven enterprise-class RAID technology to the SOHO/SMB users. SmartStor saf...More at PCNation
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