Seagate Business Storage Series NAS Unboxing & Overview
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2013-05-07
·
1,820 words · ~9 min read
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For the sake of expediency, we're going to spare you guys unboxing a couple of
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networkattached storage devices from Seagate. But this is their new business
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storage line. We've got a couple of different configs here. So, the first
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one is their 2 bay 4 terbte uh with
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drives one, and that one makes sense to me. In the past, uh, whenever you've
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bought a NAS from a hard drive company, whether it's Seagate or one of their
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competitors or whoever else, um, it's always had drives in it. Seagate is now
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offering their NAS without drives. So,
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this one right here is a 4 bay NAS that
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looks to go up against the likes of guys like Sonology or QAP or any other
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standalone NAS manufacturer. So, what does Seagate bring to the market that
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they think is so special? I'll tell you what, and actually I'm
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kind of sold. Now, with that said, these are not necessarily priced at consumer
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price points because they do have some business grade features, but they're also not as highriced as some of the
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business grade NASA's I've encountered in the past, which is kind of cool. So,
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check this out. It includes their Black Armor software, so you can discover your
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NAS on Windows and Mac. You can do incremental or full system backups in
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Windows. You can also recourse restore systems one by one. Incremental is
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really, really cool. It means you don't have to use up all your drive space for a couple of backups. Um, okay. Hot
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swappable SATA 2/3 drive bays. USM slot.
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This is really cool. Check this out. So, this is intended for off-site backup.
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So, you can use your NAS as a convenient way to put data on something that can be
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archived easily or sent somewhere else. So, check this out. This is one of
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Seagate's um I forget what this one is. They've I've lost track of what the
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branding is. This is an older Free Agent Gooflex, although it works with their
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newer stuff as well, where it's just a nice little slimline 2 and 1/2 in
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portable drive. You can get them in much higher capacities now. This one's 500
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gig. You slot that in there, you transfer some data, you throw a label on
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it, you archive it on a shelf or you put it in a safety deposit box or wherever
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else you want to keep it safe. Very, very cool little thing to include.
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That's on both the 2 bay and the 4 bay and it works just like that. Um, you've
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also got two USB 3 ports for additional expansion. So, there's a USB 3 in the
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front just in case you're keeping it like I don't know on a desk or something
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or whatever else. And then they each have an additional USB 3 port in the
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back next to haha check this out dual
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gigabit Ethernet ports. Now, that's not to say that you're going to get 2 GB per
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second transfer speeds out of it, but it's redundancy. So, if one of these
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interfaces fails outright, this thing will still work, which is very, very
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cool. Your power in as well as a hard reset button are also located on the
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back of both of these devices. So, there's those USB3 ports I was going to
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talk about. The 2 bay has a 40 mil fan, whereas the 3bay has what appears to be
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a 92mm fan that you can pull out and
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change if you want, I suppose. Um, I usually end up doing that with Nazis
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just because they ship with fans that are unnecessarily um powerful and I usually put like a
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super silent low RPM fan in them. They both include the exact same set of
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accessories. So, you've got a power cable, a gigabit Ethernet cable, and
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your warranty information, as well as a software disc that includes all that
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backup stuff that I talked about before. Uh, so your warranty is 3 years on these
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products. Let's go ahead and start getting into what makes them even more
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special than that. Full support for all of your usual uh
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servers. So, you can run an FTP server off of it. Uh, you can run an HTTP
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server off of it. Wo ho ice scuzzy
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targeting. Very cool. Um, the last time
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I looked into this, it was 450 to 500
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bucks for a bear enclosure that um,
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worked with ice scuzzy but wasn't particularly fast. So, I'm really
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excited to see what Seagate's got going on here because that's a very competitive feature to have um, even for
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like a higher priced product. So, very very cool. Very few Nazis support ice
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scuzzi in the sort of smaller more inexpensive sort of I mean okay normally
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you're looking at like a net gear like rack mount or something like that. Uh
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multiple volume management that's cool. So you can set up different storage volumes. You can also if you don't want
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to set up different storage volumes you can do quota and share management for different users. Uh as well as volume
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level encryption so you can manage who can see what who has access to what
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who's allowed to use how much of the space and all that good stuff. if it supports Active Directory um as well as
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RAID 0 1 5 10 or span. And I would really recommend guys with a server like
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this, a 4B server um where you're keeping presumably business important
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data of some sort. Do not run a single drive. Do not run RAID zero. It
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shouldn't even support RAID zero. I wish the manufacturers would just stop
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including support for RAID zero because it's terrible. um run RAID five or RAID
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10 where you're using either one drive or half of your drives for redundancy
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just in case something bad happens. So redundancy and off-site backup is what
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storage is all about. So I just showed you the whole process of installing a
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drive. Um I wanted to check out what drives Seagate's including with these
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enclosures. So this one right here has two two TBTE drives in it. So they're
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using their Barracuda series drives. I wouldn't have minded seeing them
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including their constellation series drives which are their um their more uh
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sort of enterprisegrade storage drives but I guess if the intention is for the
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user to be using RAID anyway uh personally in my own NAS that I use for
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all of our TechTips data I am using Barracuda drives so you know I can say
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all I want oh you should be using you know enterprise grade drives but I
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actually don't and I haven't really had any issues with that either. So there you go. Uh what else they got going on
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here? local backup. Oh yeah, this is so cool. NAS to NAS backup is supported. So
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you can go USM/ USB device to NAS. So you can kind of go, okay,
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I want to back up this thing. For example, this right here is our Steam
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game drive. So we have all of our Steam games for our test benches on here. So
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if I'm like, oh, it'd be a real pain if that drive died and I lost it. I could
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do an incremental backup just by popping it in here and configuring it every once
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in a while. Very, very cool stuff. The 4 bay has a little LCD in the front, by
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the way, in case you guys are wondering. 2 bay doesn't have that. You can also
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have multiple NAS and back up from NAS to NAS. That's something that many NAS
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do not support or the functionality is so hidden and so broken that it's
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basically not usable anyway. So, that's very very cool. Uh there's a one-touch
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transfer button on the front. There's that one. And uh network backup. Yes.
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Very very Oh, cool. That that that kind of stuff just gets me geeking out. Apple
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time machine software is supported, which is cool. As well as bare metal
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restore over network. That's another huge one. Being able to do a bare metal
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restore basically means that you can circumvent a lot of the inconvenient
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stuff that comes along with backing up machines um sort of normally with
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respect to licensing and stuff like that. So, it's a it's a very convenient way to be able to do backups. Uh it this
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is another thing too. this. I mean, you could consider an iTunes server or a DNA
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server to be more of a consumer grade feature, but I personally don't because
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if you were to deploy probably not something like this, but probably something like this one where you throw
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two drives in here in RAID one so that you have redundancy just in case
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something dies. You put that in like a store or something. You use the iTunes
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server or the DNA server to power all of your digital signage off of this one
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little box. That's what I see that kind of functionality being for. So, it does
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support both iTunes and DNA. So you can stream to supported devices. I don't
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think I ever showed the front of them up close. So there's activity LEDs, USB 3,
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power button, and then same thing on the other one. I wish the front wasn't
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glossy, but I guess it's not the end of the world. And then on the other one,
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same thing. Power activity LEDs, and then your front USB 3. I think that
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pretty much Oh, yeah. Seagate private cloud. So you can create your own sort
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of cloud. I mean, really, that's what a NAS is. Creating your own network
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storage so that you can have all of your storage in one place. I'm a huge
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advocate of network attached storage. I think everyone should be using it for
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pretty much everything. But their Seagate private cloud is not just the
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ability to kind of set up an FTP server for yourself and cludge it together, but
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also the ability to uh use their smartphone app to access your little
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private cloud wherever you are. So there you go. Keep all your data somewhere,
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keep it safe, and then preferably
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keep it somewhere else as well. Thanks for checking out this unboxing and first
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look at Seagate's business Nazis.