Ajump Impression iNAS P104S 4-Bay SFF 1TB NAS Server
By Alexander Grundner |
December 21st, 2004
Comments (4)
Say Hallo to my little friend, the sub $1,500 Impression iNAS P104S 4-Bay Small Form Factor Terabyte Serial ATA NAS. Not exactly Tony Montana’s weapon of choice, but the P104S has all the bells and whistles you’ve been craving in a SFF NAS server, like an embedded NAS operating system, 32-bit RISC Network Storage Processor, Serial ATA interface, Gigabit Ethernet, and hardware RAID levels 0, 1, 5. What’s more the feature-rich P104S is compatible with Windows, as well as Mac, UNIX, and Linux systems.
However, the greatest selling feature is that each P104S is custom built to your specs, fully tested, warrantied for one year, and includes lifetime technical support. So if you’ve been considering a higher priced model or contemplating putting together your own NAS server, have a look at the P104S and save yourself the headache.
December 22nd, 2004 at 7:02 am
Question about NAS Storage devices.
Do you need to have four HDD? If you just went with 2 x 250HDD, would that be good.
One more thing, is the data that is backed up or stored on the NAS, the same on both HDDs? For Example, I back up all of my digital photos to one HDD, does it automatically go to the second as well? If so, that leads me back to my original question, why do you need four HDDs?
Thanks
December 22nd, 2004 at 7:54 am
Finally, a real 1 TB-class RAID5 NAS at a halfway reasonable price. Great find, Alexander! So, have you ordered one yet??
rohodoug, according to their website, you can buy it with as few as 1 HDD, so I think the answer to your 1st question is no.
Regarding your question about how data is stored, that depends on which RAID configuration you choose to employ. Here’s the quick answer.
RAID 0 - 2 drives share all data, which is striped (i.e. split) between them. This makes for faster R/W speeds, but offers no data backup security. In this case, I think the network connection is probably the bottleneck, so any HDD speed gain may be moot.
RAID 1 - HDD#2 is a perfect mirror of HDD#1. This makes for a great backup scheme, but is a bit inefficient with HDD space, since you only get as much effective storage as 1 HDD can hold.
RAID 5 - Data is split between multiple HDDs, similar to RAID1, but each chunk includes enough parity data so that, if one HDD fails, its data can be reconstructed using the data and parity from the remaining HDDs. This is more efficient usage of HDD space, but takes more processing power to manage, and can be slower than the other schemes, since more complex R/W activities are necessary.
You can do a Google search on RAID for details.
December 25th, 2004 at 8:53 pm
I just ordered a setup for a 1.4TB RAID 5 array, I’m not sure why everyone wants this mini form factor, I’d think you’d do a lot better going with a more standardized size that’s ideal for ventalation. Your media server should go in a hidden location anyway, or at least not in your living room, so the size isn’t so important. We went with an 8 bay hot-swap 3U Rack configuration witht he Broadcom card many note and seven Seagate Barracudas.
December 26th, 2004 at 4:28 pm
Impressive setup! Takes some pics so we can all check it out.
I agree with you, though, that a standard-sized enclosure would allow for better ventilation, but the SFF is so much more unobtrusive and is usually quieter by design.