LG N2A2 NAS Review

by Ganesh T S on July 18, 2011 11:30 AM EST

The consumer Network Attached Storage (NAS) market has seen tremendous growth over the past few years. As connected homes become more ubiquitous, the need for centralised storage has become very important. On one hand, we have full blown NAS appliances like the ones from Synology and QNAP. They are aimed at the SMB market, but also serve home consumers well. On the other hand, we have appliances targeted specifically towards home consumers. D-Link and Netgear are some of the more famous companies catering to this market. LG is also trying to cater to this market with some NAS offerings aimed at the home consumer.

LG differentiates itself from the rest of the competitors' units by offering DVD and Blu-ray rewriters as part of the NAS unit. However, the unit we are looking at today is the plain vanilla offering.

The LG N2A2DD2 2TB (2x1TB) comes with two preinstalled hard disks. The disks in the N2A2 can't be replaced by the user. The diskless version is the N2R1D (based on a previous generation Marvell chipset), and it is much cheaper than the N2A2. We will come back to the comparisons with the N2R1D towards the end of the review, but first, let us look at the specs.

The full brochure from the LG website can be found here. In the next section we will take a look at the package contents.

 

LG N2A2 Unboxing and Setup Impressions
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  • Visual - Tuesday, July 19, 2011 - link

    Stop wasting time with crap like this.
    If you mean to review NAS boxes, find some that are actually worth it, with space for 5 or 6 3.5" drives in RAID 5, preferably with hot-swap support, or just don't bother.
  • ganeshts - Tuesday, July 19, 2011 - link

    Point noted. But, we also need to target home consumer solutions.

    The 5 / 6 drive RAID5 solutions you mention are targeted towards SMBs, and we do cover those too. By the way, we have two boxes which came in after this currently in the review queue (QNAP and Netgear), and I am just starting out with the benchmarking for those.
  • dhiiir - Friday, July 22, 2011 - link

    I have been using Version 1 for several years and it works great. Version 2 is getting good reviews although a few people were upset that it doesn't continue the use of Drive Extender. That didn't bother me too much as there are add-ons for DE if you really feel you need that functionality. The Newegg price for WHS is very tempting.[[ w w w -( upsfashion )- c o m ]]I personally feel that the site is very good, there are many things we need, so I want to share with everyone. I believe you will like it.
  • freez3 - Saturday, February 11, 2012 - link

    Hi @ll,

    first many thanks to AnandTech for the great testings on this NAS.
    It was very nice to see that you have also a deep lock at last single detail,
    data recovery when the main board breaks down.
    You have done a great job!

    Did some body has experience with the NFS shares on this LG NAS?

    I was a little bit surprised as I have seen this feature in the Web Interface,
    because of it was not tested here and it was also not in the feature list of LG and shop I've bought it

    After a quick test, the disillusion I've realized that NFS on N2A2DF2 is very slow only 2 MB/S writing,
    with a mirrored 2TB HDD drives.

    Perhaps one of my settings are wrong.

    Thanks for your help!

    Regards
    Freez3

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