Seagate Business Storage 8-Bay Rackmount NAS review

Dave Mitchell Read more February 17, 2014

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£3817

Price when reviewed

Seagate’s first foray into the world of rack-mountable NAS, the Business Storage 8-Bay Rackmount, is something special. Not only does it cram eight 3.5in hard disks into a 1U chassis, but it’s also great value – the 32TB model on review costs far less than the competition.

Seagate has achieved this high storage density by opting for an Asus micro-ATX motherboard – a choice that leaves room in the front of the chassis for two rows of four LFF SATA drives.

Installing and replacing drives is simple: the drive bay cover pops off easily, and you fit a carrier by flicking back the locking button, dropping it into a free bay, sliding it towards the combined SATA/power connector and pushing down the lock.

The Seagate is powered by a dual-core 2.3GHz Celeron G1610T CPU, and equipped with 4GB of DDR3 RAM. The motherboard’s four embedded SATA II and two SATA III ports provide six of the disk interfaces, while the other two are handled by a dual-port SATA II card fitted in a riser card.

At the rear, the pair of Gigabit ports can be teamed together, and there are three USB 2 ports for external devices. However, there are no USB 3 ports. Power redundancy is provided by a pair of 250W hotplug PSUs. Seagate also bundles sliding rack rails and a cable management arm.

Installation starts by pointing a web browser at the appliance and following a quick-start wizard. This loads the latest firmware, asks for a system name and admin password and sets up a base set of shares. The installation process creates a SimplyRAID array, which allows you to mix drives of different sizes in the same array and provides single-drive redundancy. If necessary, you can delete this array and opt for SimplyRAID with dual redundancy, or create standard mirrors, stripes, RAID5 or RAID6 arrays instead.

The appliance’s web interface provides a clear status overview of all services. Shares are simple to create, and access can be controlled with local user and group lists, or by joining a Windows domain. Support covers SMB, NFS, AFP and FTP/SFTP access, and a useful feature is the ability to enable each service on specific network ports. Multimedia features comprise an iTunes server and support for media streaming to UPnP/DLNA devices.

Seagate’s TappIn service allows shares to be accessed remotely over the internet via a web browser, or via dedicated Android and iOS apps. From the web browser portal, you can view shares, create new folders and upload or download files, and the iOS app provides remote access to shares and the media server. It isn’t as advanced as the mobile apps from Synology or Qnap, though, which also provide status details on appliance utilisation, disk health and storage usage.

Workstation backup software isn’t included, but there’s no shortage of options. The Seagate can act as a repository for third-party backup products; supports Apple’s Time Machine; and can replicate to other appliances compatible with rsync.

The appliance also ties in with LaCie’s hosted cloud backup service, Wuala. After installing the local Wuala app, you can link it with shares on the appliance and run scheduled backups, or opt for continuous syncing. The Wuala app maps its off-site drive to a local letter so you can restore files from its user interface, or by dragging and dropping. It worked fine during our testing, but the free 5GB of storage doesn’t go far – a 100GB Business package for 5 users costs around £320 per year.

Performance is good across the board. Drag-and-drop copies of a 2.52GB video over Gigabit delivered read and write speeds of 105MB/sec and 101MB/sec respectively. FTP speeds using the FileZilla utility were respectable, too, with a 22.4GB folder filled with 10,500 small files copying across at 72MB/sec.

Support for IP SANs is also provided, allowing you to choose a size for your iSCSI target and apply CHAP authentication if necessary. Performance is good, with Iometer reporting a raw read throughput for a 1TB target of 112MB/sec, which is fast. Thin provisioning and LUN backup aren’t available, however.

There’s a downside to packing a 1U chassis with eight LFF hard drives. In testing, the outermost drives ran at around 45˚C, and the two rear inner drives – which are positioned where cooling is least effective – reached as high as 51˚C; the lid was hot to the touch. You’ll want to ensure the appliance has plenty of airflow around it and avoid placing anything directly on top of the chassis.

Stacked against the PC Pro Recommended Qnap TS-870U-RP, the Business Storage 8-Bay Rackmount NAS comes up short on features and lacks the former’s 10GbE support. That said, we wouldn’t discount the Seagate completely. The 32TB model is competitively priced, offers unbeatable storage density, and is no slouch when it comes to performance.

Basic specifications
RAID capability	yes
Connections
Ethernet ports	2
USB connection?	yes
Physical
Dimensions	43.5 x 772 x 17.5mm (WDH)
Software
Software supplied	Seagate Constellation ES.3