UMLan

Everyone is trying to save some money now a day and by everyone i mean regular joe and companies. It doesn't matter if you own large or midrange or even small company, you must be concerned with the marketed being highly unstable and of course your assets and cash flow. Purchasing IT equipment is becoming more and more a science thing than anything else. Most small or medium size companies struggle to come up with some kind of budget whether it is renewal or upgrade of the equipment. I am IT Systems Engineer for a medium size company and i know first hand that it is not an easy to per sway my boss to purchase a 40k NAS for data storage. Most people in my positions either spend quite bit of money on equipment or use "bandaids and rubber bands" to prolong some of the IT assets. But there is only so much you can do until a user runs to you to recover a file which he/she lost 2 weeks ago. If the data is not kept on some kind of storage with a solid backup (grandfather, father, son methodlogy) you could be in trouble. Today we are going to take a look at a small to medium business solutions for simple file storage, Seagate BlackArmor NAS 220. BlackArmor NAS 220 is designed to keep your business data safe as it provides RAID 1 support and hardware based encryption. Let us take a look at BlackArmor NAS 220 and see what is has in store for an average consumer as well as the business user.

Central networking that fits your business.

Network storage for up to 20 workstations. Designed with the small business in mind.

Keep your business data safe and available
Support up to 20 workstations
Automatically backup every networked computer at your workplace

Built to grow with your business.

Simple enough to let you focus on what matters.

Automatic, continuous backup of connected workstations.
Two reliable, user–replaceable Seagate hard drives.
Two USB 2.0 ports for external drives, printers and UPS.

Security that’s built right in.

You have plenty of things to worry about. Your network shouldn’t be one of them.

Automatic data mirroring with RAID 1 configuration.
Hardware–based encryption keeps your files secure.
Secure internet access to files with easy permissions and controls

All the details that matter.

The features you want. All in one place.

Microsoft® Active directory support.
Multi–volume management.
Event email notification.
DLNA and iTunes® media streaming.
3–year limited warrant
Designed to provide centralized storage and data backup for up to 20 PCs.
Enables automatic data mirroring with RAID 1 configuration.
Protect network connected PCs with incremental and full–system, automatic backup.
Functions as an FTP server for remote file access.
Stream media to DLNA® compliant devices and computers running iTunes® software.
Includes two reliable, user–replaceable Seagate® hard drives.
Connect external drives, share a printer or utilize an uninterrupted power supply with the two USB 2.0 ports.
Secure files with powerful hardware-based encryption.
Integrates with Microsoft® Active Directory.
Multi–volume management.
Event email notification.
3–year limited warranty.

Specifications

BlackArmor® NAS 220

ST340005LSA10G-RK

Specifications
Model Number	ST340005LSA10G-RK
Interface	Ethernet
Capacity	4TB
PERFORMANCE
Spindle Speed	7200 RPM

Now that we got basic information out of the way, lets take a closer look at BlackArmor NAS 220.

As always, in the beginning of our reviews we take a look at physical aspects of the product. Seagate has designed the BlackArmor NAS 220 shipping box out of the recycling material. I am not sure if it is a cheaper but i am sure it is better alternative for our global environment. All around of the packaging box we found numerous references to Seagate BlackArmor NAS 220 unit. This unit comes with two Seagate hard drives and are 2 Tb each. So in RAID 1 total capacity equals to about 1.81 Tb of actual usable storage. Of course if you are not concerned with the redundancy of your data (i don't know why wouldn't you be) the total usable capacity in RAID 0 would be close to 4 Tb. Please remember that RAID 0 does not provide any redundancy for the data.

BlackArmor NAS 220 comes with a handy GUI admin console and some of its features are listed on the both sides of the unit. Technical specifications of this unit are mind blowing as BlackArmor NAS 220 does pretty much anything you want it do. You can do a lot of customization of this unit anywhere from Disk Quota to Download Server for flies via http and ftp. Rather impressive.

Taking the BlackArmor NAS 220 out of the shipping box was pretty easy. Just a few cuts and pulls and the whole unit came out. Seagate ships this unit with protective bag and plastic foam around the BlackArmor NAS 220 for protection of the hard drives. Not often but it happens, that you might receive your hard drives and they would not work. This might happen because of the poor shipping packaging and handling of the item. You wouldn't have to worry about this with BlackArmor NAS 220 unit as it comes being very secured in the box. With the actual unit Seagate provides a power adapter, a gigabit enabled cat5e cable, instructions manual and of course the discovery cd for configuring BlackArmor NAS 220. Without this cd you will not be able to properly configure the BlackArmor NAS 220. The front of the unit is made of what looks like soft plastic, it is also covered with protective plastic to keep BlackArmor NAS 220 from being scratched during shipping.

Both right and left sides of the unit are identical and have no markings or vent holes. It would be a good idea to add some ventilation holes to the side of the unit. BlackArmor NAS 220 comes only in one color, black. So if you are looking for some color in your life, better get used to black. This unit is powered by one 92mm fan which is located in the rear of the unit. The whole air gets sucked out from the back. As you will see in the next few pictures, the intake for this unit is located in the front.

On the back of the unit we found two USB 2.0 connectors, a gigabit ethernet connector, reset pin hole and power socket. As we have mentioned earlier, this unit comes with one 92mm fan which is located on the back to provide air cooling for the whole system. The air is being taken from the front top and bottom of the unit.

On the bottom of the BlackArmor NAS 220 we found four rubber feet which provide great support on flat surfaces. No one wants their equipment to move while in operating state.

On the front of the unit we found just one button, power button and two small LEDs for hard drive and network activity. Once the unit is powered on, the power button gently glows with light blue color. The whole installation took less than 2 minutes and was pretty easy. However the configuration of the BlackArmor NAS 220 took some time as there are a lot of features this unit has to offer. Later in the testing of this unit we will show you what we mean by a lot of features.

First i would like to go over the administrator web console where all of the configurations are done. I feel that this should be covered as there are number of fields that require special attention. There are total of five areas of the administration for BlackArmor NAS 220, System, Network, Storage, Access and Media. Lets take a closer look at every section and see if there is anything worth of mentioning here.

In the System screen we found general information about the unit such as the time settings and the ability to rename the unit if needs to be. Under the General Setup we found a field which allow us to change the way web access protocol is being served by internal server. The options here are http and https. With running under https and with certificates, BlackArmor NAS 220 make a great addition to the web accessing applications. Under Advanced we found areas where you could import SSL Certificate or a key for BlackArmor NAS 220 to use. Very handy and rather impressive on a small unit as this.

In the Network Settings we found also general information about the network state and configurations of gigabit ethernet adapter. What we thought was cool is that this unit can be configured as an FTP server and point outside of your firewall for external access. Not a bad feature if you ask me. If your company is running Domain Controllers, you can make BlackArmor NAS 220 to be part of a particular domain. The two sections which i found confusing were the Printer Manager and Spooler setting. Assuming this is right, you could be able to run a use printer trough the BlackArmor NAS 220. Very interesting.

Under the Storage tab we found some helpful information regarding the hard drives inside of the BlackArmor NAS 220 and their state. By default the hard drives come in RAID 1 configuration but Seagate give you ability to chose RAID 0, RAID 1 and Spanned hard drive configuration. If you need to set up an automatic downloader, BlackArmor NAS 220 can be set up to do just that. I cant thing of any application where this could be useful but its better to have and not needing it than needing it and not having it. What i thought was cool, BlackArmor NAS 220 allows you to perform backups USB to NAS, NAS to USB and NAS to NAS. As we all know even NAS needs to be backed up. So by scheduling the automatic backups to another NAS or USB storage, this would take care of the backing up issue.

Not many features here. One thing we don't see here is the active directory settings. This NAS has pretty much everything but active directory integration? Odd. Besides that there is nothing special here but optioned to create users and user groups for the file share access.

Under the Media Server Settings we found very few options here. BlackArmor NAS 220 is able to serve DMS and iTunes connect to your devices. No settings for compression or quality here either. I feel like these two sections (access and media) were lightly overlooked.

So how did we actually tested BlackArmor NAS 220? I have spend about a week just using it for my personal needs. Publishing files to it and using ftp to gain access to some of my every day files. One thing that needs to be noticed is that when you write to the NAS or read from it, it creates a loud rattling sounds. This might be the implication of the hard drives and nothing else. I have looked over the some forums and found that the st320000542as has some clicking noise. I am not sure if that's normal or a defect but it gets a bit annoying over time. The temperature of the enclosure was rather cool. I was expecting it to get a little bit hot but all we got is a all round 60 degrees.

After about a week of burning in the unit, we have performed Intel NAS Performance Benchmark and the results were as follow. Just to mention, all these benchmarks were done in full gigabit layer 2 environment.

I feel like we need an explanation to our readers of how does the Intel NAS Performance Toolkit performs its 13 benchmarks. Here is the explanation of each benchmark.

These benchmarks look at the performance of the NAS unit while playing up to 3 files simultaneously of 720p video using Windows Media Player. The data is calculated based on the sequential reading of these tests.

This benchmark is responsible for writing a HD Video file in 720p to the NAS. As we know this test is basically made of recording the sequential transferred data.

In this benchmark Intel is looking a the simultaneous read and write of the HD Video file in 720p.

In Content Creation benchmark, Intel creates files on the NAS. Files are being created are random and majority of them are video files.

This benchmark is made of collecting data writes operations to the NAS. In this benchmark Intel creates and opens files which are created by random applications.

With this benchmark we record the data transfer speeds of 4 GB files to and from the NAS.

Very similar to the File Copy To/From NAS benchmark. In this benchmark we transfer a total of 126 files of about 190 MB of total size.

In this benchmark we determine the throughput of the 169 small photo files which total about 1.2 GB in size.

As you can see from the Intel NAS Performance Toolkit, the overall performance of BlackArmor NAS 220 was not terribly horrible but it could be much better on few factors such as Content Creation and Office Productivity. What did surprised me were the Directory Copy To/From NAS benchmarks. With an average of 1.7 Mb/s and 2.4 Mb/s we are not going to get anywhere too fast. However this is expected behavior of benchmark running smaller files. When you transfer large files with a NAS the speed ramps up, but when you copy one or even many small files, the NAS doesn't reach top speed. Think of a car getting on the freeway. If you accelerated onto the freeway and the metering light came on, you would have to stop, then accelerate again, but if the metering light didn't come, you could reach top speed and keep on cruising. In short, your experience may be different depending on the file size.. Over all transfer speed for HD Video Playback and recoding is normal considering the hard drive speed. HD Video Playback with 720p file was averaged on 32.7 Mb/s. Not too bad at all if you are planning to watch some home made movies.

Seagate BlackArmor NAS 220 has a lot of potential as it enters the hungry market for cheap storage and performance. By offering office class performance BlackArmor NAS 220 becomes one of the candidates for the small - medium size companies. Everyone is trying to save some money and with the tag price for about 400$ you just cannot beat BlackArmor NAS 220. In addition BlackArmor NAS 220 offers many customizable features as RAID levels and http and ftp services for its users. This unit is strongly oriented towards the business class and not your every day, personal use. Keeping this in mind there are few things which could be improved in the BlackArmor NAS 220 or perhaps the next firmware. One thing we found that could be improved is the active directory integration with BlackArmor NAS 220. It would be very helpful to be able to restrict or alow users to access certain files on the NAS. The throughput speeds on some of the features we found could also be improved. We strong think that the hard drives which are used in BlackArmor NAS 220 need some additional attention as well, as they create a lot of noise while operating. As the technology moves forward so does USB. This unit is equipped with USB 2.0 connection. We would advise Seagate in to looking upgrading this unit to USB 3.0 connections for faster speed transfers.

Over all our experience with Seagate BlackArmor NAS 220 has been pleasant one and we are very satisfied with this unit asset of those minor issues we have mentioned. I think this unit will do well under the price tag of 400$ USD in the business world.