Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)The Cisco NSS 324 is essentially a Network Attached Storage (NAS) device. Like the Drobo/QNAP and many other products, it's designed to be more than just a storage solution, but double as an 'appliance' as well.
Let's go over what you get:
- This particular model has 4 bays, loaded with 1tb drives each. Cisco also sells models that are 2/4/6 bays, both with hard drives, and without.
- Small Business Ready. Built in Windows/Mac networking, RADIUS server (although not yet in the firmware), RAID 0/1/5/6, iSCSI targetting, apache webserver (with built in PHP), MySQL server, FTP, Syslog server, encryption, the list goes on.
- Things that are more geared towards consumers. Can allocate space to Time Machine (OS X's back up method), iTunes sharing (with making smart playlists on the machine), twonky media server (allowing you to stream DLNA -- PS3/XBox compatible), and more.
Setup was easy, turn it on and it prompts you to walk through the steps. By default it will ask you the level of RAID (I choose 5 -- 1 redundant disk -- RAID 6 would give you 2 redundant disks), and then it will set it up and make it available. If you have a Windows computer I believe you can use the CD to setup as well, and on all platforms after initial setup you can go to the web browser, port 8080 of the ip address and it will load the admin console.
Some of the issues. When I was reading up on the device, one of the things I was excited about were the packages. These are bundled applications that you can load on to the device and you get their functionality. While some of these were prebundled (MySQL server for instance, among others), it didn't appear as there was a place to download additional ones. In asking in Cisco's support forum, it appears that these are not due out until September, with a firmware update (that should bring RADIUS support) coming in late August. I'm excited to get Python on the box, as well as a bittorrent client for offloading processing power from my normal machine.
Things I've used. So far I've enabled the Time Machine backup, allocating the space was very easy, both Mac's found the drive easily(it advertises via bonjour), and haven't had any issues with backing up. I also added a few user accounts, and set them both up on the respective computers, allowing access via AFP. In order to give myself additional space on my main computer, I also enabled iSCSI targetting, and used GlobalSAN's free targetter for OS X to link to it. It was painless, and gives speeds much better than my internal drive, while still looking like a physical drive to my computer.
Performance. For a couple people using this device it's incredible. Connecting over gigabit ethernet I hit speeds of 78.3 megabytes a second, although most speeds stayed around 30-40 megabytes/s. Actual processor is a dual core Atom processor at 1.6ghz, so it's quite beefy.
Features I haven't used, but excited about. One of the features there, is that if you are upgrading to larger drives, you can replace them one by one, and then it will rebuild it. No more trying to copy the data somewhere else, and then rebuild it. Granted most NAS drives do this I believe, but it's still nice to have.
QNAP. Cisco says these devices are made by their partner QNAP, however the firmware upgrades are not linked to QNAP, and will be provided by Cisco. Which means that the features sets will probably be divergent. Cisco seems to be more small business friendly, while QNAP seems to have some more consumer friendly features (ie they just came out with iPhone apps for playing videos). Cisco wins highly on warranty, I believe you get 5 years, while QNAP is much lower (something like a year).
Looking forward to using bitorrent/python on the box, along with other packages. Will update review when these start becoming available.
If anyone has specific questions, add a comment to this review, and I'll try to get the info to you.
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Cisco NSS 324 4-Bay 4 TB (4 x 1 TB) Smart Network Attached Storage NSS324D04-K9Cisco NSS 324 4-Bay Smart Storage w/ 4TB
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