New To The Charts: Seagate BlackArmor NAS 220

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Tim Higgins

The BlackArmor is two-drive version of Seagate’s BlackArmor NAS 440 aimed at small business users. It comes in 2 and 4 TB versions and supports JBOD, RAID 0 and RAID 1 volumes that can be optionally encypted.

The NAS 220 uses a different hardware platform than its four-drive sibling, which does not include the 1.2 GHz Marvell "Kirkwood" 88F6281 NAS processor used on the NAS 440. There is also only one Gigabit Ethernet port that supports jumbo frames up to 9K. Two USB 2.0 ports can be used for USB flash and hard drives for expansion or backup, print serving and UPS shutdown synchronization.

Power consumption is 22 W with two Seagate 7200.11 Barracuda drives. Fan and drive noise are low, meaning the NAS is barely audible in a quiet room. Drive spindown can be enabled, which reduces power consumption to around 7 W.

CIFS/SMB and NFS network file systems are supported, and files can also be accessed via FTP. HTTPS is supported for admin access. Files can also be securely remotely accessed via Seagate’s browser-based Global Access service.

Media features include iTunes and UPnP AV / DLNA servers and there is a download manager for HTTP and FTP, but not BitTorrent files.

Built-in backup features include USB to NAS, NAS to USB and NAS to NAS with immediate and scheduled modes. Five licenses for Seagate BlackArmor Backup are bundled for Windows client backup, including "bare metal" restore.

RAID 1 write performance with a Gigabit LAN connection averaged 19.6 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 37.7 MB/s with the same conditions. File copy performance using a Vista SP1 client under the same conditions (RAID 1, Gigabit LAN) measured 17.3 MB/s for write and 42.6 MB/s for read.

Read the full review.

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