New To The Charts: Seagate BlackArmor NAS 110

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Tim Higgins

The Seagate BlackArmor NAS 110 has been added to the NAS Charts.

The BA NAS 110 is basically a single-drive version of the BlackArmor NAS 220, available in 1 (tested) and 2 TB versions. The 3.5" Seagate ST31000528AS Barracuda 7200.12 SATA drive is not user-replaceable.

The NAS 110 shares all of the features of its two and four-drive siblings (except for RAID), which include SMB/CIFS and NFS network filesystems, optional volume encryption, immediate or scheduled backup to / from attached USB drives & rsync servers and UPnP AV / DLNA, iTunes media servers. See the NAS 220 and 440 reviews for full details.

Iomega StorCenter ix2-200 Network Storage

The NAS 110’s hardware design is very similar to the NAS 220, with an 800 MHz Marvell 88F6192 Kirkwood CPU and 128 MB of RAM. I wasn’t able to get the plastic covers off without risking cracking them, so wasn’t able to get a board shot. I suspect, however, I would have found a board very similar to the NAS 220’s with Marvell 88E1116R Gigabit Ethernet, 32 MB of flash and a Genesys GL850A 4 port USB 2.0 Hub (two ports are brought out).

The 110 is relatively quiet, but you can hear drive noise in a quiet room. Power consumption measured 12 W with the drive running and 6 W when the non-programmable HDD Standby power-saving mode is enabled. (Idle spindown time seems to be around 10 minutes.) There is no programmable shutdown / startup feature.

As noted above, CIFS/SMB and NFS network file systems are supported as is anonymous and account-based FTP. There are also iTunes and UPnP AV /DLNA media servers.

Immediate and scheduled backup (1 day, minimum backup period) can be done to and from attached USB drives and to rsync servers.

Fastest backup of our ~ 4 GB standard filecopy test folder measured 6.15 MB/s using a FAT formatted USB drive, which was essentially the same as the NAS 220. NAS-to-NAS backup of the test folder via rsync to a QNAP TS-239 Pro measured 15.39 MB/s.

Write and read performance with Gigabit and Gigabit with 4K jumbo frame connections is shown in the Figure below. Write performance with a Gigabit LAN connection averaged 22.0 MB/s for file sizes between 32 MB and 4 GB, with cached behavior not included in the average calculation. Read performance was significantly higher, measuring 35.9 MB/s with the same conditions.

Seagate NAS 110 performance benchmarks

Note the sharp falloff in read performance with a 4K jumbo frame connection. The 110’s user interface allows free entry of MTU value for jumbo frames and changed our 4000 entry to 4004. We also tried entering 4088 which the GUI changed to 4092 and yielded slightly worse performance.

File copy performance using a Vista SP1 client under the same conditions (Gigabit LAN) came in about the same for write at 20.1 MB/s, and somewhat higher for read at 46.0 MB/s.

Given the similarity to the other BlackArmors, a full review of the NAS 110 isn’t planned. You can further explore and compare performance (including backup performance) using the NAS Charts.

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