Intel's SS4200-E Entry Storage System BYOD SATA NAS has been added to the NAS Charts.

Intel's primary focus for the product seems to be OEMs and the product is available without an OS as the SS4200-EHW. But the "-E" retail version runs EMC's Lifeline NAS software.

The NAS has plenty of horsepower, being based on an Intel Celeron M 420 with 512 MB of RAM, which can be upgraded to 1 GB. The Ethernet port is 10/100/1000 but doesn't support jumbo frames.

The mix of home and business features has some holes on the business side. Active Directory is supported, but user groups are not, nor are NFS and AFP protocols. While client backup is supported via bundled licenses for EMC's Retrospect client, there is no way to run a scheduled backup of the NAS itself. On the home front, there are UPnP AV and iTunes servers, but no web photo sharing feature.

RAID 5 (default) and RAID 1 modes are available, but the RAID 10 mode mentioned in the spec isn't. Note that there are no individual drive or JBOD modes, you can't control the number of drives used and there is no RAID level migration.

Performance however, is excellent with a chart-topping average RAID 5 write performance using a gigabit Ethernet connection of 48.4 MB/s! Read performance is also top-of-the-charts, but lower at 40.4 MB/s.

You can also use the NAS Charts to run your own comparisons, check out the slideshow, or read the full review.

Tags: BYOD, Intel, NAS, RAID,

Related Articles: