14 DAY TRIAL // One of the world's leading storage vendors, Seagate, has announced two new Network Storage Devices (NAS) as part of its growing series of BlackArmor NAS servers. The new BlackArmor NAS 420 and 440 servers have been designed for small and medium business users, providing them with a choice for a secure and multi-featured NAS, which enables them to store and protect their critical data.
According to Seagate, both of their new BlackArmor NAS storage products ship as “fully-contained, out-of-box solutions with user-serviceable, [tool-less] hot-swappable drives that are RAID-configurable 0/1/5/10 arrays,” designed to support the storage requirements of up to 50 workstations. There's a small difference between the two models, namely that the 420 comes with just two hard drives, installed in the four available hard drive bays, while the 440 has all of its four drive bays occupied.
For best performance, the BlackArmor NAS storage device has been featured with a 1.2GHz processor and 256MB of RAM memory. In addition, it boasts two Gigabit Ethernet ports and four USB 2.0 ports. According to Seagate, read speeds of up to 50MB/s are possible when the 7,200RPM SATA hard drives are connected in RAID 5 configurations. The NAS also comes with bundled backup software, which offers support for up to 10 Windows clients. This can be set to “continuous and automatic, incremental and full-system backup. In the event of PC hardware failure, you can utilize the bare metal restore feature to recover your entire system, including the operating system, programs and settings.”
The BlackArmor NAS supports CIFS, NFS, HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, Bonjour, Microsoft Rally network and Microsoft Windows Server Active Directory. Price wise, the BlackArmor NAS 420 comes at a MSRP of US$799.99, offering 2TB of storage, while the higher model, the BlacArmor NAS 440, is slated for a MSRP of US$1,199.99, offering 6TB of storage. These versions are already available, with Seagate promising that an 8TB one will be released in May.