Seagate's Intel Rangeley NAS Pro 4-bay Review

Miscellaneous Aspects and Final Words

It is expected that most users would configure the Seagate NAS Pro 4-bay in RAID-5 for optimal balance of redundancy and capacity. Hence, we performed all our expansion / rebuild testing as well as power consumption evaluation with the unit configured in RAID-5. The disks used for benchmarking (Western Digital WD4000FYYZ) were also used in this section. The table below presents the average power consumption of the unit as well as time taken for various RAID-related activities.

Comparing these numbers with that of the other four-bay NAS units, we find that the power consumption is actually lower than that of even ARM-based units such as the LenovoEMC ix4-300d and Western Digital EX4. The numbers are also lower than that of the QNAP TS-451 (probably due to the absence of bridge and hub chips on the NAS Pro board). At this point, the only downside of an Intel x86 NAS platform for home consumers seems to be the cost.

Avoton and Rangeley FTW

Coming to the business end of the review, it is clear that the Rangeley unit excels in three areas: multi-client performance, encryption capabilities and power efficiency. Despite Seagate's NAS OS not being as mature as those from other COTS NAS vendors (such as Synology's DSM or QNAP's QTS), it has no problems in bringing out the potential of Intel's Avoton and Rangeley for the NAS market.

Multi-client performance in terms of average response times is better because of the highly integrated I/O compared to other solutions (both ARM-based and some of the other x86-based solutions) which use bridge chips and have bottlenecks in connecting to the CPU. The appearance of AES-NI in the Atom-class SoCs has finally delivered power efficient encryption capabilities. Obviously, the 22 nm fabrication process as well as tight I/O integration greatly help in reducing the power consumption of the platform compared to other solutions in the market.

From a hardware perspective, Seagate has hit a home run by becoming the first COTS NAS vendor to have a lineup with the new Atom SoCs from Intel. We had some issues with the choice of the ARMADA 370 for the NAS lineup, but there is absolutely nothing to complain about the platform for the NAS Pro units. Avoton and Rangeley are cost-effective solutions for the storage market, and the choice of the Atom C2338 is perfect for the SMB market segment. The icing on the cake is that it is one of the most cost-effective 4-bay SMB-targeted NAS solutions in the market too, even in a diskless configuration. Seagate's strength lies in bundling their NAS HDDs into the units. The pricing strategy in that case will only work further to their advantage.

NAS OS - Getting Better, Slowly, but Surely

Credit must be given to Seagate for putting forward a lineup of NAS units that target the SMB market segment with the features that it demands. There are no unnecessary home consumer-targeted features and NAS OS is quite stable - something that businesses appreciate. Seagate is continuing to work on adding more and more necessary features to NAS OS, made evident by the progress we have seen in moving from the LaCie 5big NAS Pro to the 8-bay Rackmount to the NAS / NAS Pro 4-bay units now. The roadmap that Seagate shared in terms of improvements to the iSCSI feature set (striving to get the units certified for virtualization solutions) and general performance improvements give us confidence that NAS OS will continue to evolve and become even better. There are still quite a few business-oriented features that the firmware could provide (snapshot support, for instance). On the software side, Seagate seems to be doing the right things.

Final Verdict

Despite the missing features and required performance optimization, we believe Seagate's renewed focus will prove beneficial in expanding their presence in the SMB market. Pricing is also very aggressive, a welcome surprise given that this is the first COTS NAS lineup utilizing the new Atom SoCs. From a SMB/SME perspective, Seagate's handling of all the aspects of the NAS - the drives, the chassis and the hardware/software design - in-house will provide them with the confidence to adopt these solutions.