Smartstor NS4600 Raid 5 Nas/media Server
From PROMISE TECHNOLOGY
SmartStor NS4600 is a High Performance 4 drive RAID 5 Network Attached Storage and Digital Media Server for Home, SOHO and Small Business. The SmartStor NS4600 is DLNA Certified under DLNA DMS Guidelines 1.0, features iTunes Server with Video Playback.
SmartStor NS4600 shows promise but still needs work
There are plenty of detailed technical reviews of this device on the internet so I'm just going to focus on my experience with this NAS. I'm not going to benchmark transfer rates or anything like that.
This unit needs some additional work and support, particularly more plugins. It should also be noted that the few plugins that are available need to be configurable. You can't change any of the settings in the Bit Torrent or Media Server plugins which is a real pain.
The web interface needs work too, it's pretty simple and the media services available via this web interface are very, very limited indeed.
Promise is advertising this more of a feature-rich appliance suitable for home or small office. I don't agree, it's barely fine for home use.
There are issues that need to be addressed. For example, I added a third 1 TB drive to the two drives I had in the unit and it took almost 21 hours before the drive was integrated and could be used. Windows 7 keeps randomly being unable to connect the drives (Vista did this too). I have five volumes defined. I boot up my PC, and anywhere from 1 to three of the drives are disconnected though the others are connected. Sometimes I boot up and all the drives are connected. They all use the same credentials but when the drives won't mount Windows wants the credentials again.
This unit does show some promise, so if Promise fixes the issue with the non-configurable plugins, drive mappings, adds additional plugins, and vamps up the web interface, particularly the media portions it could be a winner. As the unit has been available for several months and no new plugins have been released, I fear plugin support is going to be spotty at best!
I would not recommend purchasing this unit at the present time as right now its just an OK NAS with delusions of more. Promise needs to promise to keep improving the the functionality of the NS4600 going forward.
Decent hardware package but the NAS OS needs work
Out of the box, this NAS is attractive. However, the OS on this box needs work. If you are technically inclined please read on.
After I added my 4 1.5TB drives and powered it on. It showed up under Bonjour->Webpages in Safari. I was able to configure it very quickly. Promise got this part right. I was planning to use it as a media and file storage in our home network that is 100% Mac based. So, I enabled AFP for file-sharing and enabled FireFly for iTunes media sharing. I also turned on DLNA for experimentation. So far so good. When I attempted to transfer over 2 TB of content from my FreeNAS server using my MacPro I started seeing problems. I could not transfer more than 20-30 GB without the NS4600 disappearing from the network completely requiring a reboot of NS4600. Promise tech support is very accessible but could not help me, they first blamed it on my OS saying that said they had not qualified their product on Snow Leopard and asked me to try it under Leopard and try using Samba (SMB). So I installed Leopard in a different volume and tried AFP share first. That exhibited the same problem I saw in Snow Leopard. Then I tried SMP on Leopard, that worked but was about 28% slower than AFP (BTW, I have not seen SMB outperform AFP in any of the NAS systems I have tested). SMB worked fine in SnowLeopard as well. At that point, I disabled SMB, enabled AFP, and retried copying files using my Mac Pro running Snow Leopard. This time the copy worked! Something about using SMB once seems to have made my NS4600 happy! So, the AFP implementation in NS-4600 is unreliable and Promise did not have anything to say about it when I asked them for comments.
FireFly iTunes server had difficulty streaming my movie files. They should show up as movie files in iTunes on my Mac. But, when I tried playing, only the audio part would play. This is apparently a known bug that will be fixed in a future update.
Because of these problems, I retuned my NS4600 back to Amazon and got a Synology DS-409 as a replacement. So far the Synology DS-409 is working well. I would recommend that over the Promise NS-4600 based on my experience.
The best nonbuisness NAS!!!
I have spent a lot of time researching different NAS solutions for my home office but this is the best product. Outstanding performance, great options, and if you are are a MAC user it supports Time Machine. So far I only have a 2tb drive but it is expandable to 8tb and you can expand online. I would read through the option list but it does everything a business NAS would do, just on a smaller scale.
