Seagate Nas 440 Firmware Mac Users Will

We tested the NAS devices performance using this setup as well as both four-drive and two-drive RAID 0 configurations in order to place it on a level playing ground with competitors.

However, youll need at least two of these NAS devices if you want to keep your data secure.

The four hot-swappable drive bays have 3.5in Seagate hard drives installed, though the specific model depends on the configuration you purchase.

Our review unit was filled with four 1.5 terabyte Barracuda 7200.12 hard drives for 6TB of raw storage space.

This configuration isnt currently available in Australia, though Seagate also offers 4TB and 8TB capacities for 1599 and 2599, respectively.

Each drive bay is lockable and, if you need to replace a drive, the trays are conveniently tool-less.

The BlackArmor NAS 440 provides four USB 2.0 ports (one on the front) and two Gigabit Ethernet ports which support failover.

Seagate doesnt disclose the specific internal components, though the NAS devices processor is known to be clocked at 1.2GHz.

It is accompanied by 256MB of memory.

This certainly isnt a powerhouse, particularly when you compare to NAS devices boasting an Intel Atom or Core 2 Duo processor with 1 or 2GB of memory, like the QNAP TS-459 Pro Turbo NAS.

The Web-based BlackArmor Manager interface is clean and efficient.

Our main qualm was the need claim a newly inserted hard drive before you can add it to a volume.

This only takes a few seconds, however, and isnt really frustrating.

The NAS device supports RAID levels 0, 1, 5 and 10 as well as JBOD configurations, with the Web UI customising the available options depending on how many drives are chosen for a volume.

The user interface even provides a time gauge for the RAID build, which is very handy for RAID 5 builds that can take up to six or seven hours at a time.

An automatic firmware updater is available, and the NAS device provides the usual niceties like dynamic DNS, user quotas and UPnPiTunes media servers.

Seagate Nas 440 Firmware Mac Users Will

While Seagate offers a Mac-compatible discovery utility, there is no direct support for AFP or Bonjour network protocols, so Mac users will have to suffice with SAMBA or FTP file access.

You can set up and manage backup schedules between the NAS and USB storage, as well as online remote replication from one BlackArmor to another.

However, there is no support for backing up to or acting as a backup for a non-Seagate NAS device.

Without an open source standard such as rsync or FTP backups, the BlackArmor offers a disappointingly closed ecosystem for data security.

Seagates bundles the Acronis-based BlackArmor Backup software suite with the BlackArmor NAS 440, affording Windows users a number of tailored backup options as well as hard drive cloning and management tools.

The Web user interface provides a licence manager, allowing you to import and manage up to 10 BlackArmor Backup serials at a time.

The software initially encourages you to create a backup image of your entire computer, but other options like Try and Decide let you manage system restore points when installing software that may corrupt the system.

You can back up based on file format groups such as just music or only documents but, unlike the WD SmartWare software in Western Digitials My Book Elite, you can exercise extensive control over the file types included and to which group they belong.

Performance By default, the Seagate BlackArmor NAS 440 aligns all four 1.5TB drives in a RAID 5 array, providing 4.5TB of storage with one drive redundancy.

Seagate Nas 440 Firmware Update