Tech Olive

Needless to say, we were extremely excited to review our first ever NAS drive. After several previous storage reviews of Seagate products, it was time for us to up the ante and this honkin’ 6TB BlackArmor NAS 440 from Seagate was a perfect place to start. Unlike most network storage drives, which can sometimes be a pain to setup, Seagate’s BlackArmor NAS series is meant for those small businesses that don’t have the knowledgeable IT staff on board to help them with their network and PC management. In other words, it’s meant so that even the most technological illiterate users can set this thing up. Maybe that’s what Seagate claims, but was it really true? We knew that we could set it up with no problems, but we decided to put ourselves in the shoes of the non-geek gifted to see if setting it up would really be a stroll in the park for the end users.

First of all, we were amazed at the capacity of the BlackArmor NAS. 6TB is a lot of freakin’ space and we got to wonder exactly how many different types of media files we could fit on this puppy. Behold:

• 1,365 HD Movies (Average of 4.5GB/movie for 720p)
• 8,988 SD Movies (Average of 700MB/movie)
• 1,258,291 Songs (Average of 5MB/song)
• 1,572,864 8MP Photos in JPEG (Average of 4MB/photo)

Again, that’s a lot of freakin’ space.

Physically connecting the BlackArmor NAS to our local network was a breeze. One ethernet cable was all it took to share 6TB of storage amongst ourselves, but not until we plugged the darn thing in and turned it on. The soothing, quiet sound of four hard drives simultaneously booting up and spinning was a great melody.

Dang, we still had to install the BlackArmor Discovery software to actually get the NAS noticeable on our network. Not to worry because that process was a walk in the park as well. The software is what really makes the BlackArmor NAS very easy to use. We simply named the NAS drive (we named it Bob), set up the admin account, configured what RAID setup we wanted (in our case, no pun intended, we used RAID 5) and the NAS drive showed up instantly for easy access. For us, we had the BlackArmor show up in “Networks” (we were using Vista), but you can easily map the NAS drive to show up in “My Computer”. The Discovery software was actually still pretty useful after setting up the NAS drive. It basically acts as a control panel for the BlackArmor NAS and numerous actions can be done such as shutting down/restarting the drive, checking out the health and capacity levels of the four hard drives and so much more.

Aside from the Discovery software, the BlackArmor Manager allows you to setup and manage user accounts with passwords in case you only want certain people accessing the NAS drive. The software disc also includes 10 licenses to the easy-to-use BlackArmor Backup utility.

Performance wise, the BlackArmor NAS has both pros and cons. After monitoring several file transfers, we calculated the write speed at only 10.3MB/s. However, the read speeds were very respectable. The NAS drive handled the streaming of HD movies over a wireless connection flawlessly, which made us very happy.

Startup and restart time was really slow though. It took two minutes to fully restart the BlackArmor NAS, which obviously blows if you’re extremely impatient, but to be logical, two minutes is to be expected for such a robust machine.

As far as physical features, the LCD display is quite useful. You can browse through many options and look up information about the NAS drive such as its IP address, its host name, drive health,  drive temps, volume percentage, fan health and fan speed. Despite the great usefulness of the LCD display, it was kind of difficult to effectively navigate through the LCD display options with only two buttons controlling it. It would’ve been nice to have at least a seperate “Select” button. An option to toggle the backlight of the LCD display would’ve been nice as well.

The BlackArmor NAS also comes with 4 USB ports, which can be used for other external storage devices or connecting an everyday USB printer to share with other computers. A second RJ-45 port is available as well for interconnecting multiple NAS devices. We would’ve liked to have seen an eSATA port so that we could connect our eSATA external hard drives to the BlackArmor NAS.

Our can of Coke comparison with the BlackArmor NAS:

As you can see from the comparison, the BlackArmor NAS is a very compact device, proving that great things come in small packages.

It is very safe to say that the BlackArmor NAS series from Seagate is extremely easy to setup and use for being what it is. It’s great for not only small businesses, but also for those individuals looking for a large network drive to share and backup their most precious files on. We definitely think it has its usefulness for almost any type of business or household anywhere and anytime. If you think you don’t need it, you’re wrong.

Scores

- Price: 9
The 6TB BlackArmor NAS is actually significantly cheaper than other similar NAS drives.

- Setup/Install: 10
For being a NAS drive, it was ridiculously easy to setup.

- Ease of Use: 8
The included software was easy to use and drive maintenance is a breeze, but the LCD display navigation simply was a pain in the butt.

- Performance: 8
Although write speeds weren’t up to par, read speeds were tremendous and the drive is very quiet!

- Features: 7
It included 4 USB and 2 RJ-45 ports, but eSATA would’ve been nice. A third navigation button for the LCD display would’ve helped as well.

Overall: 8 Olives

Photos taken by Steve Hage – www.pointphotodesign.com