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<\/p>\nAuthor: Gerry Blackwell
\nReview Date: 10\/8\/2007<\/i><\/p>\n
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How much storage capacity will be enough for your small business or office down the road? The beauty of a network attached storage (NAS) product like the NSA-2400 from ZyXEL Communications Corp. is that you don’t need to answer that question now. You can start small when your business is small and grow your storage capacity as the volume of data grows.<\/p>\n
The NSA-2400 is an “appliance” that manages hard drives to help small and medium-size office users store boatloads of data, keep it secure and make it available on a network to any authorized user. It has its own processing hardware and onboard software, and it includes four bays, each of which can hold a hard drive of up to 1\u00a0terabyte\u00a0(TB).<\/p>\n
That’s enough capacity to store tens of millions of text documents, hundreds of thousands of songs and digital photos or thousands of full-length movies. I can remember when a 60 megabyte hard drive was considered sufficient. (Yes, I’m really old.)<\/p>\n
You buy the NSA-2400 without hard disks for as little as $710 online, and then buy hard drives separately and install them yourself. Any standard 5-inch drive will do. Typical cost for a 250GB drive: $70. Typical cost for a 500GB drive: $90-$170.<\/p>\n
The NSA-2400 lets you configure the disks in the appliance in several ways. You can make one big volume &#!51; so that all the disks together look like one big drive. But the NSA-2400 also supports\u00a0RAID\u00a0(Redundant Array of Independent Drives, which gives you either improved performance or better data reliability &#!51; or both, but at a cost. It supports RAID0, RAID10, RAID5 and RAID5 Spare configurations.<\/p>\n
RAID saves parts of each file on two or more drives in the array &#!51; this speeds up the process. It can also store data twice, once on one drive or array of drives and simultaneously on another drive or array. This reduces the NSA-2400’s overall capacity, but it means that if one disk or array fails, the system can automatically switch to the other so you don’t lose any data, or any time restoring data.<\/p>\n
The other big advantage over less expensive single-disk NAS solutions is that the NSA-2400 lets you back up not only client devices &#!51; desktop and laptop workstations attached to the same network &#!51; but also\u00a0SQL\u00a0and Exchange servers, without interrupting those services.<\/p>\n
The product ships with Genie Backup Manager Lite 7.0 from Genie-Soft Corp., which can back up and restore files, documents, e-mails, settings and programs on client machines, and Genie Backup Manager Server 7.0 for server databases. This software runs on a PC or server and backs up data to the NSA-2400. The device’s own software includes backup functionality that lets you back up its data to another NSA unit or other NAS device or a USB hard drive. There are three USB ports on the NSA-2400 for plugging in external drives.<\/p>\n
Like most NAS products, you manage the NSA-2400 from a computer connected to the same network, using a browser to access the device’s onboard software. The software lets you perform a variety of functions related to configuring network and disk volumes, monitoring disk and volume status, backing up and restoring data stored on the appliance and controlling who can access its shares. (Think of shares as Windows folders full of data made available over the network.)<\/p>\n
The built-in backup is the only thing at all out of the ordinary for NAS devices. Most of the other functionality is standard fare, though on the NSA-2400 it tends to be more detailed and comprehensive. Yet the user interface is no less intuitive than on other NAS products I’ve tried.<\/p>\n
ZyXEL, unfortunately for our testing purposes, sent a unit with disks already installed and partly configured. Installing disks is easy, though. Each bay has a vertical drawer that slides out easily. You bolt the drive to the drawer frame using screws provided with the drive, slide the drawer back into the bay and close the latch to complete the installation.<\/p>\n
The rests of my out-of-the-box experience was a little bumpier but ultimately satisfactory. The bumpiness was mainly due to inadequate documentation and misleading messages generated by the software. For example, the hardcopy manual that ships with the product says that when you turn the appliance on for the first time, it will take about 50 seconds to boot up and then the SYS light on the front will turn solid green, along with the Power and LAN lights. It didn’t the first time.<\/p>\n
The SYS light remained orange long after the 50 seconds had elapsed. A ZyXEL technical support agent told me that this happened because the disks in the unit were unformatted. If the disks have not been formatted &#!51; and if you’re installing brand new disks in the NSA-2400, as most buyers will, they won’t be formatted &#!51; the light glows orange until you’ve created disk volumes. To do that, you have to install the included client software on a PC first.<\/p>\n
The client software, the NSA Discovery Utility (NDU), detects the NSA-2400 on the network and tells you that it’s properly installed (or not). It also provides access to the set-up wizard on the device, a program that guides you step-by-step through the process of formatting and configuring the NSA-2400.<\/p>\n