NAS
Western Digital recently unveiled their first energy-assisted magnetic recording (EAMR) HDDs for the retail channel. Today, the company is taking advantage of the same hardware platform with some tweaks in the firmware features to introduce the 16TB and 18TB WD Red Pro for SMB network-attached storage (NAS) units. Like the WD Gold 16TB and 18TB models, the new Red Pro drives are also based on conventional magnetic recording (CMR), with a 7200 RPM spindle speed, and recommended for use in NAS systems with up to 24 bays. Having learnt from the WD Red SMR fiasco, the company explicitly points out the suitability of the new drives for use in NAS systems adopting ZFS and other such modern file-systems, while also supporting stressful RAID array rebuilds...
Western Digital Red Review: Are NAS-optimized HDDs Worth the Premium?
Western Digital (WD) introduced hard drives specifically targeted towards NAS systems under the Red branding last month. We had some initial coverage at launch time, where WD claimed a...
87 by Ganesh T S on 8/17/2012Netgear NV+ v2 and LaCie 2big NAS: A Second Look
Last November, we reviewed the Netgear NV+ v2 and came away quite satisfied with the price to performance ratio. However, we had some reservations about the absence of NFS...
8 by Ganesh T S on 7/18/2012WD Introduces Red: NAS Optimized HDD Line
WD did everyone a favor when they reorganized their products under color-coded branding a few years ago. With the Blue (mainstream), Green (quiet and cool) and Black (performance) lines...
39 by Jason Inofuentes on 7/10/2012LaCie's 2big NAS Review
The SMB (Small to Medium Businesses) / SOHO (Small Office / Home Office) NAS market is a highly competitive one. We have been reviewing a number of ARM-based 2-bay...
15 by Ganesh T S on 5/28/2012Thecus and McAfee Partner for Antivirus Technology in Intel-based NAS Systems
Thecus announced a partnership with McAfee at CeBIT 2012 to bring antivirus technology to their lineup. On April 16th, Thecus announced that that Thecus NAS systems would start shipping...
2 by Ganesh T S on 4/19/2012Thecus TopTower Lineup: High-End Enterprise NAS Systems in a Tower Form Factor
NAS vendors in the high-end enterprise space often reserve the more powerful CPU configurations for their rackmount models. A case in point is QNAP's Xeon based 200TB+ storage rack...
24 by Ganesh T S on 4/12/2012QNAP at CES : SMB Lineup Refresh and a 200TB+ SAS Storage Rack
QNAP is one of the more popular vendors in the SMB NAS space along with Synology. At CES, QNAP had a booth with samples of selected lineup members. The 1...
4 by Ganesh T S on 1/12/2012Synology's DSM 4.0 with CloudStation : A Private Dropbox Solution
The NAS market has grown by leaps and bounds in the last few years, but the hard drive shortage resulted in a weak Q4 for the NAS industry as...
4 by Ganesh T S on 1/12/2012AppliedMicro's Catalina: Integrated USB 3.0 and 802.11ac Support for NAS Platforms
AppliedMicro (AMCC) announced the availability of the Catalina SoC (APM86491) for low power and cost effective NAS systems today. The previous generation version (APM82181) was the heart of the...
1 by Ganesh T S on 1/10/2012Western Digital My Book Live Duo: RAIDing the My Book Live
We had reviewed the Western Digital My Book Live in detail last October and came away impressed with the functionality and mobile app support in place for the cost...
1 by Ganesh T S on 1/5/2012PogoPlug Series 4 Introduced; USB3.0 Meets The Cloud
PogoPlug has been making appearances in a number of products for a few years now. The premise is simple: take a low-power ARM computer, give it a NAS optimized...
24 by Jason Inofuentes on 12/14/2011Netgear's Marvell Based ReadyNAS NV+ v2 Review
Netgear's ReadyNAS lineup is well respected in the sub-$5K SMB / SOHO / consumer NAS market. In November 2010, Netgear updated their Ultra lineup meant for the high-end prosumer...
39 by Ganesh T S on 11/9/2011WD My Book Live Network Attached Hard Disk Review
The rise of powerful home networking solutions have led to the shift in consumer focus from DAS (Direct Attached Storage) units to NAS (Network Attached Storage) units in the...
28 by Ganesh T S on 10/11/2011QNAP TS-659 Pro II Review
The SMB (Small to Medium Businesses) and Corporate NAS market is a highly competitive one. Over the last one year, we have been expanding our coverage of this market...
69 by Ganesh T S on 9/19/2011LG N2A2 NAS Review
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...
24 by Ganesh T S on 7/18/2011Synology DS211+ SMB NAS Review
The SMB (Small to Medium Businesses) NAS market is a highly competitive one. A lot of things have changed since the last time we covered this market in a...
49 by Ganesh T S on 2/28/2011LaCie 5big Storage Server NAS Review
Back in March 2010, Intel announced an Atom based platform optimized for storage applications. Using either a D410 or the dual core D510, paired with an Intel 82801IR I/O...
37 by Ganesh T S on 11/8/2010Seagate GoFlex Home 2TB Reviewed
If you’ve got more than one PC in the home, having a network drive to share files, stream media and create backups can make a lot of sense. Seagate...
30 by Rajinder Gill on 10/10/2010ZFS - Building, Testing, and Benchmarking
Click to enlarge If you are in the IT field, you have no doubt heard a lot of great things about ZFS, the file system originally introduced by Sun in...
105 by Matt Breitbach on 10/5/2010