Monthly Archive for April, 2009

I needed a way of keeping my important files safe. Since I’m far too lazy to do regular backups I decided to get a NAS (Network Attached Storage) device – it’s basically a box which sits on the home network and does nothing but store data. In theory such a device can be very reliable because it only has to do one thing very well. Furthermore since most of the volume of the device is dedicated to storage, you can store a great deal more than you might be able to within your PC.

After much investigation I decided to buy an Edgestore NAS400 marketed by a company called Edge10. This is an attractive fully-featured NAS server designed for small businesses and home users. It does pretty much everything that a business-user would want, however it’s got a few annoying problems that make this a disappointing buy for most home-users:

The Edge10 NAS400 is a rebranded version of the Promise NS4300N. The hardware is identical, however the software is different. Edge10’s offering is based on an old fork of the Promise firmware, and as a consequence it still has many of the flaws which Promise fixed in their firmware. If after reading this you still like the idea of the NAS400, I’d strongly advising you seek out the Promise version of this product unless you are completely sure you can live with all of the current firmware’s failings.

Lets begin with the bad news: The cooling-fan on the unit is excessively noisy, it always runs at full speed regardless of the case temperature. That’s fine in a server room or in a noisy office environment. It’s way too loud for a home-office. This not a hardware fault, it’s actually a bug in the firmware which Promise have fixed a few months ago. Unfortunately Edge10 have not yet ported this to their own version of the product.

The Promise version of this product supports a range of interesting plugins, including one which allows the NAS to download data via bittorrent. That sounds like a great feature, the ability to directly download to the NAS, removing the need for PCs to be switched on all night. Unfortunately Edge10 have decided not to port this plugin to their version of the product. This sounds rather silly, as I’m sure there are plenty of bittorrent fans who would be delighted with a high-capacity storage device which could also download.

Another benefit of the NAS400 is the ability to stream content to various kinds of multimedia device. Standards such as DLNA also known as UPnP should in theory allow all certified devices to inter-operate. The product claims to be DLNA compliant with the addition of a plugin.

Unfortunately this plugin is incompatible with Microsoft’s XBox 360. I suspect that this is the sort of thing which could be fixed easily if Edge10 cared or if they opened the system up to 3rd party developers, however this is not currently the case, and that leads me on to my final point:

This system is based on Linux (an open-source platform): You would expect it to be easily modified and customized, however that is not he case: This system is locked down. Even if you own your NAS400 you do not have the ability to configure it beyond the limited options available in the admin web-interface. Even though this is Linux, you cannot modify the system, you are stuck with what they give you.

So in summary – it’s a mixed bag: The NAS400 is great hardware and very robust implementation of it’s primary feature (storage). The RAID support is great, after all it’s built around Linux’s well-tested RAID system. Unfortunately, while the main stuff is done very well, the overall offering is let down by less than stellar firmware.

I think most small businesses would appreciate the NAS400 but most home users would be better off with something like a Cisco/Linksys MediaHub which gets all the multimedia stuff 100% right but lacks some of the flexibility of this model. Were it not for the incompatibility with the Xbox 360 (my primary household media player) this would be a perfect device.ambien cr buy fed ex delivery Ambien Cr For Sale buy alprazolam from mexico
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