We tested load power measurements when the NAS was streaming a 1080p video clip to a Playstation 3 and idle measurements after 15 minutes of inactivity – a period when the hard drives were set to spin down.
The NS4600 has comparatively high power consumption and no hibernate feature
Excellent file transfer speeds appear to have come at the price of above average power consumption. The idle power consumption is particularly odd and we suspect the NS4600 isn’t slowing down our RE2-GP hard disks properly. At 31W and running 24 hours a day, the NS4600 has running costs of £30 per year.
The hotswappable caddies can be pulled and replaced as needed
There’s no scheduled on/off on the NS4600, which lets some other Nas boxes hibernate at any time you please, perhaps during the night time, so they draw just half a watt and make no noise. Instead, the NS4600 will carry on chugging away until you manually turn it off, when it draws an unreasonable 4W. Its saving grace in this area comes from its wake-on-Lan function, which lets you turn the NS4600 on remotely using the SmartNavi utility.
Verdict
The lack of MySQL and scheduled on/off are arguably the NS4600’s biggest flaws but, according to Promise, these features should appear in future firmware updates. If all goes to plan then such addictions, along with the Gatekeeper service, will put the NS4600 on the top of the NAS box shopping list. For those wanting these functions now, there are plenty of 4-bay NAS alternatives for £400 that will do the trick. Nevertheless, the SmartStor NS4600 still has more features than most. It’s quiet and has excellent media streaming capabilities with very fast transfer speeds. In this capacity, it certainly lives up to its promise. ®
More NAS Reviews...
Western Digital Sharespace |
Cisco Linksys Media Hub |
EZY Technologies MyXerver MX3600 |
Iomega Home Media Network |
Promise Smartstor NS4600
COMMENTS
Typos in the 'Schudule List' screen :)
Almost as fun as spotting the typos in the Curry House/Chinese restaurant menus -- one of the best ones I saw was 'Mixed Girl' -- think they meant Mixed Grill :)
One word...
...Synology.
Get yourself the immensely more customisable, versatile, and technically more advanced Cube Station (or if you want to go really crazy then then DS409+), and you won't be disappointed. The ajax web interface is awesome, and they keep adding features, even retrospectively. You can also pick about in the shell and install optware, making it basically a very low power, low cost fully-fledged server.
Faster Reads in RAID1
Of course reads are faster in RAID1. The RAID algorithm can pick either disk to read from, whilst simultaneously moving the heads on the other drive to the next piece of data.
vs. the Acer easystore h340...whats the point?
Like the Drobo...this seems excessively overpriced compared to the Acer easystore h340 WHS, or the HP equivalent, the Acer at least of which comes with 1TB of storage out of the box, plus 2GB of DDR2 for significantly less.
