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The BlackArmor NAS comes nicely packed with everything you need, which isn't much with a NAS. NAS devices are designed to be easy to setup, user friendly, and easy to operate. In fact I've setup printers there were harder to configure than the BlackArmor.
In the box you will find the Black Armor NAS, a power cable, power supply, network cable, software disk, and quick start guide.
As you can see from the image below, we have a single USB port in the front along with a power button and activity lights. The access door require no tools to open and exposes all four hot-swappable drive bays.
The hot-swap bays simply slide out the front. Talk about the ultimate easy access.
Each hard drive is housed in a plastic housing which allows the drive to be quickly and easily swapped out in the rare occasion that a hard drive fails.
Below is a picture of the BlackArmor with all four hard drives removed. As you can see, the BlackArmor is almost entirely hard drive space. Seagate has done an excellent job in compacting the BlackArmor making it much easier to hide than a full tower file server.
The BlackArmor is setup to use RAID 5 by default. The advantage of RAID 5 is that it allows for maximum data storage, while at the same time features redundant data backup. With the BlackArmor, if a drive goes down, the data is still stored on the other hard drives and is never lost. The bad hard drive can then be "hot-swapped" without ever turning off the NAS and the data is rewritten back to the new hard drive by clicking simple commands in the BlackArmor software utility.
So what is RAID 5? RAID 5 calculates parity in order to achieve redundancy rather than writing a second copy of the data, like RAID 1. Parity is distributed across the physical drives along with the data blocks. In each case, the parity data is stored on a different disk than its corresponding data block. RAID 5 makes efficient use of hard drives and is the most versatile RAID Level. It works well for file, database, application and web servers. RAID 5 is more widely used due to the fact that it only takes 3 hard drives to create a RAID 5 array and if 1 drive goes down, no data is ever lost. However, the storage capacity of RAID 5 is reduced by one drive. Therefore, if you have four 1TB hard drives, the actual storage space is only 3TB.
On the back of the NAS 440 you will find 2 network ports and 3 USB ports. Why 2 network ports? The BlackArmor's two LAN ports can be configured for link aggregation, which means you can connect both LAN ports to your network at the same time and improve transfer performance. The BlackArmor server then uses both network connections simultaneously so that it can transfer data at a faster rate. Alternatively, you can use one LAN port to connect to your network and the other LAN port to set up replication, or archive backup, where an exact copy of the data on your BlackArmor server is created and maintained on a second BlackArmor server. |
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