Snap Appliance Guardian 4400
Snap Appliance is the division of Quantum that recently spun off to focus on NAS appliances. As such, you'll notice a fair bit of Quantum branding on the device and Web interface—at least for the time being.
The Guardian is a 1RU unit with quite a small footprint; it's only marginally deeper than it is wide. The charcoal grey front panel includes status LED's for each of the four drive bays, there are also status LED's for the two network ports as well as power and system status LEDs. At the rear you will find a serial port, a pair of USB ports, and a pair of 10/100/1000 Ethernet ports. There is also an Ultra SCSI 160 port located at the rear, that is provided by an internal PCI-64 Adaptec 29160LP card.
A 1.266GHz Pentium III processor with 512MB of ECC SDRAM powers the system; there is also a free memory slot for additional RAM. The single power supply (there is no provision for a second) has a pair of cooling fans while a very large fan cools the CPU.
To access the hard drives, the front facia must be removed—a very simple task. The drive cradles have a very smooth locking action, one of the best we have seen.
The supplied Quick Start Guide, while pretty basic, was nevertheless enough to get the unit up and running and an IP address assigned. The User CD includes a fairly basic utility called NASManager, which enables you to locate the NAS, get information such as current configuration and BIOS version, set the IP address, shutdown or reboot the NAS, or launch the Web Browser administration page. Web administration is a very complete management tool and about as easy to use as you could get.
The Snap Appliance was the only NAS configured with gigabit Ethernet, and in the performance testing this bestowed a significant advantage. In every test the Snap Appliance was faster than the other three NAS units; at times more than four times faster.
| Product: | Snap Appliance Guardian 4400 |
| Price: | AU$13,405 |
| Vendor: | LAN 1 |
| Phone: | (02) 9319 6411 |
| Web: | www.snapappliance.com |
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| Interoperability: |
½Supports Windows (SMB), NFS, Appletalk. |
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| Futureproofing: |
Relatively little expansion potential, somewhat improved by the external SCSI connector. |
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| ROI: |
½Moderately priced for its features and excellent performance |
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| Service: |
3-year warranty and free support during standard business hours. |
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| Rating: |
½ |
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8%
1%
