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ZyXEL NSA320 2-Bay Power Media Server
Mark: Good
This is a small NAS (network attached storage) server with two drive bays.
It doesn't come with hard disks, you must provide those yourself.
It takes 3.5" SATA hard disks of up to 3TB, for a total capacity of 6TB.
The NSA320 supports a whole bunch of networking protocols, including
CIFS/SMB, NFS, and FTP. It also boasts a number of fancy media and
cloud services, which I don't particularly care about. I got this for
running system backups onto, not streaming video to my game console.
Fortunately, it's easy to ignore the features you don't need.
I ordered the NAS itself from Amazon.ca for less than CDN$130.
I also got two Seagate Barracuda 3TB SATA disks (ST3000DM001)
to go in it. Total cost was therefore a bit more than CDN$400.
NOTE: For the initial setup, you MUST have a Windows system, as the
included Windows software is required to do a first-time configuration
and format of the hard disks. After that, however, you can use the
built-in web UI to do all day-to-day management.
I installed the hard disks into the NSA320, connected it to my
Gb-Ethernet switch with the included LAN cable, plugged it in &
powered it on, and installed and ran the Windows software from a
Win7 system. The configuration is pretty simple: you set up the
network (e.g. static IP or DHCP), create user IDs as you see fit,
and choose how the hard disks will be configured. You have a
choice of treating them as separately-formatted disks, a single
filesystem spanned over both hard disks (this is what it calls 'JBOD'),
RAID-0 or RAID-1. Note that choosing either RAID option will effectively
halve the available space. For this reason, I chose JBOD - I'll be using
this for storing backups, not mission-critical data, so I decided that
storage capacity was more important than fault tolerance.
The disk initialization takes several minutes, but after that the NAS
is ready to use. You can subsequently do administrative tasks by
opening the NSA320's IP address in your web browser.
As for accessing the shared disk(s), as mentioned above there are various
supported network protocols. SMB access works very well using the NDPSMB
plugin with NetDrive or EVFS. EVFSGUI or EVFSCLI can be used to mount
shared directories. (The NSA320 creates several shares by default; you
can add others as you see fit. I created a share called 'BACKUP'
for storing all my backups under, and I created a non-administrative
user account for this purpose as well. This can all be done using the
web GUI.)
I normally back up all my laptop's OS/2 partitions using ZIP 3.0.
When I was backing up to an external USB 2.0 hard disk, a full backup
took about 12 hours. Backing up the same volumes to the NSA320 took
less than a third of that time! Needless to say, I'm impressed.
(I should note that all my systems, as well as the NSA320, have
gigabit Ethernet.)
I've only had this device for a couple of weeks, but I'm very happy with it.
It's very small, easily tucked away in a corner or under a desk, and
whisper-quiet - I can barely hear it make a sound. The only reason I don't
give it a 'very good' rating is because of the requirement to use a Windows
system for first-time initialization.
One slight caveat: I recommend configuring the NSA320 with a static
IP address. My local DHCP server has an absurdly short lease time,
and I found the IP address changed at one point. It took a couple
more hours before either EVFS or Windows clued in to the address
change, during which time they both kept trying to access the old
address for the hostname.
And a final remark: a couple of the reviews on Amazon indicate that
some units ship with an out-of-date firmware that can only handle hard
disks of 2TB or less. If you get one of these, you apparently have to
install a disk drive smaller than that before you can update the firmware
to the latest version. Just something to be aware of.
Information is sent by: Alex Taylor -- 2013-08-13 06:25:39
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