Intel enters the RAID market

Intel seems to be reaching out into anything and everything they can these days. I bought two of these banking on the quality of Intel products over the years, so far, it's been mixed with this product.

Specs

Color: Black
Drives: 4
Fans: 2
Capacity: 2TB
Power: 200 Watt
Network: x2 1Gbps ports
Other connectivity: x2 USB 2

Installation

The installation was pretty simple, pull out the drive rails, screw in the drives, push them in and latch them. Very simple. In my case, I have x3 500gb drives in it right now. Plug the power into the wall and the network cable into a live port and you are off and running.

Connectivity

I currently have mine plugged into a gigabit port and everything runs very smooth and fast. I am getting great throughput over our gigabit switches. The device has x2 ports, but have to be on different subnets if they are going to both be plugged in. The device does not support binding them together or any sort of load balancing. Depending on which port you plug into (1 or 2) will start you off with a different ip address, port 1 give the 192.168.0.101 address and the second port has 192.168.1.101 bound to it. Hopefully your internal network doesn't have anything already on either of these addresses, otherwise you may have to use a crossover cable to change the address before you can make it a member of the network full time.

RAID

The device supports RAID 0, 1 and 5. I have tested the device using RAID 5 and it works pretty well but have since changed to RAID 1 for performance reasons and it is working great so far.

Interface

Everything is web driven on the device and depending on your firmware version, will look a little different. Just a warning, firmware updates take around 30 minutes to perform, so be patient, although they are worth it. You are able to change RAID configurations, ip addresses, active directory support and so on from the web interface, very intuitive.

I found the AD support very good and works pretty well. It works on the first try for me, so I'm not sure what the other people are talking about problems it.

Conclusion

As I see it, there are only a few options right now from decent brand names for small portable RAID solutions. I use this for video archiving and it's perfect. I can pack it up and drive to the location to offload videos without having to lug around some 150 lb NAS device, this thing weighs about 15 lbs or so. Also, having the multiple RAID options is great, not many others have these available to you. Another bonus is the color, black and sleek. Working in an Ad Agency, we are all about image, and this thing does the trick.