Seagate’s Business Storage 4-Bay NAS box looks like excellent value on paper. The top-end model on review offers 16TB of raw storage, plus data-protection features including an integrated universal storage module slot for backing up to and from removable media, for £772.
Installation is swift. Seagate’s Discovery tool finds the appliance on the network and offers to map shared folders to local drive letters. The unit was supplied with all four Barracuda drives in a RAID5 array, but you can opt for mirrors or stripes instead.
The main web interface is sluggish but easy to navigate, and the appliance can use its own local user database or integrate with an Active Directory domain for access security. It supports CIFS, NFS, FTP and AFP, and you can create file-based iSCSI targets on the same volume. If you want block-based targets, a separate raw RAID volume must be created.
The backup features are okay. The appliance can act as a Time Machine target, and you can create scheduled backup jobs to copy selected shares to another Seagate NAS appliance. Jobs can also be created to copy data to and from an external USB device or the USM slot. For Windows workstation backup, a ten-user licence for Seagate’s BlackArmor Backup 2011 is included.
This is where it starts to go wrong. You can gain remote access to the appliance via the Global Access service, but the features fell well short of offerings from Synology and Qnap.
The appliance is underpowered, too. Drag-and-drop copies of a 2.52GB video clip returned low read and write speeds of 78MB/sec and 35MB/sec. FTP speeds using FileZilla were only slightly faster, and copying the file to and from a share on a Seagate Backup Plus drive in the USM slot returned even slower read and write rates of 57MB/sec and 43MB/sec.
The Business Storage is good value – you won’t find a 16TB four-bay appliance for less. The payback is poor performance and too few features.
Basic specifications | |
|---|---|
| Capacity | 16.00TB |
| RAID capability | yes |
Connections | |
| Ethernet ports | 2 |
| USB connection? | yes |
Physical | |
| Dimensions | 160 x 254 x 208mm (WDH) |
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