AnexTEK AccuSTOR NS110
In some respects the 1RU NS110 is of similar design to the Quantum; the drive bays cannot be accessed without first removing the front facia entirely. The front facia can only be released using a key to prevent prying fingers, but let's face it, in most cases the unit should be well away from the public in any case.
We have to say right from the outset that we are not fans of the NS110's drive cradles. Initially the unit was supplied without any drives so when they arrived we had to install them in the cradles, which is—to say the least—rather fiddly. OK, this is not something you're going to have to do very often, but it is not particularly elegant, and neither is the actually operation of the cradles.
In addition to the keylock, the front panel includes a power switch, recessed reset switch and status LEDs for the two 10/100 LAN ports, system operation and hard drive activity. The rear of the unit is pretty sparse with the two LAN ports and a serial port, although there is provision for an external SCSI connector.
The motherboard is a tiny unit with the NAS OS stored in flash memory. In the unit we reviewed, it accommodated an 850MHz Celeron CPU and its single memory slot a 128MB SDRAM module. There is provision on the motherboard, using a MiniPCI connector, for a SCSI card; this is not yet available in Australia.
The system included a single power supply but there is provision for dual power supplies to be fitted, however this does not appear to be a simple upgrade option.
The CPU is fitted with its own cooling fan and there is a second located in the case to cool the CPU should the first fail. There is a bank of four fans to cool the drive bays and the power supply has a pair of small fans.
Documentation was limited to the PDF files on the supplied CD, which was relatively complete, but included some less than perfect English sentence structure.
The Web interface for the NAS was a little clunky when compared to the other vendors' more polished products, but was nevertheless complete and quite easy to use.
In general the NS110 had the lowest performance of all the NAS tested. This is hardly surprising given its relatively modest specifications when compared to the other units, for example it had the slowest CPU, least memory and only two IDE channels shared amongst potentially four drives.
| Product: | AnexTEK AccuSTOR NS110 |
| Price: | AU$5360 |
| Vendor: | Bluechip InfoTech |
| Phone: | (02) 8745 8400 |
| Web: | www.servex.com.au |
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| Interoperability: |
Supports Windows (SMB), Netware, NFS, Appletalk. |
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| Futureproofing: |
½
Limited expansion potential. |
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| ROI: |
Very inexpensive even given its lack of expansion and average performance. |
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| Service: |
½2-year warranty and free support during standard business hours. |
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| Rating: |
½ |
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6%
3%
