Disk: Iomega NAS 405M
The Iomega Network Attached Storage (NAS) server is also a good way of increasing your network capacity. It was engineered basically to share information over networks.
The NAS server features a reasonably fast CPU (Intel Pentium 4 2.0Ghz), 1GB of memory, and four fast hot-swappable IDE hard disk drives, each with its own dedicated IDE channel to give you a storage capacity of 720GB.
The Iomega has a moderately deep 1RU form factor. The unit includes a simple but very robust rack mounting bracket as well as a pair of Cat 5 patch cables. The front panel styling looked very modern and includes status LEDs for the four-drive bays and systems power. At the rear of the unit you will find two 10/100/1000 Ethernet ports, serial port, two PS/2 ports, two USBN ports, a VGA port, and a SCSI port.
The NAS server also came with Iomega Automatic Backup Software. It's a very basic software application, which as the name suggests backs up your data automatically once you set up all the parameters.
We had a gigabit Ethernet connection to the NAS server. Its performance was also affected by the network connection, which proved to be the bottleneck. We were able to get some modest results, however we should remind you that this is not indicative of the type of transfer rates you should be getting when transferring from disk to disk. As we had mentioned in the introduction we were able to stream over 45MBps from disk to disk using fibre channel. This disk-based solution didn't have that sort of performance. But with that sort of performance comes a high price tag.
The NAS server managed a sustained write throughput of 8MBps, which is quite slow in comparison to tape and despite disk prices coming down in price all the time, it still remained more expensive than tape in terms of cost per GB. One area of surprise was reading data back off the disk--it was actually faster than tape at 4.27MBps. And of course you don't have to find the right tape, wind on to the right spot, and then start reading.
| Product: | Iomega NAS 405M |
| Price: | US$6199 (local POA) |
| Vendor: | Iomega |
| Phone: | 02 8875 7851 |
| Web: | www.iomega.com |
| Interoperability: |
Wide software support across all platforms. |
| Futureproofing: |
Limited storage capacity compared to tape and optical. |
| ROI: |
Less expensive that optical, more than tape. |
| Service: |
3-year limited warranty. |
| Rating: |
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