SmallNetBuilder

The 2300N is basically a two-drive version of Promise's NS4300N four-drive NAS supporting RAID 0 and 1 filesystems.

The CPU is a 333MHz Freescale MPC8313 and two hot-swappable SATA drives (up to 1 TB ea.) are supported via a Promise PDC20771 Serial ATA RAID controller. A Realtek RTL8169SC provides the Ethernet port and there is 128 MB of RAM and 32 MB of flash.

A modified EXT 3 filesystem is used, so drives are not readable by standard EXT 3 systems. The system draws around 30W with two drives installed and has no power-saving features. The feature set is essentially the same as the NS4300N, but disk snapshots and remote replication are not supported.

Performance was disappointing with RAID 0 writes with a gigabit LAN connection averaging only 10.3 MB/s for file sizes between 32 MB and 1 GB. Read performance for the same conditions was only slightly better, averaging 11.3 MB/s. Average RAID 1 writes and reads for the same test conditions yielded the same results.

Read the full review or use the NAS Charts to run your own comparisons