Ultimate White-Box NAS

CONSTRUCTING THE ULTIMATE WHITE-BOX NAS
Marc Spiwak, Technical Editor for CRN Labs, recently assembled CRN's Ultimate White-Box NAS at the Tech Builder XChange conference in San Diego.

The basis of the 1U rack-mount NAS device is a white-box NAS chassis from Xtore Extreme Storage. The chassis is a serious piece of hardware, with all of the latest redundancy features, including dual hot-swap power supplies and four hot-swap IDE drive bays. All of the electronics are ready to go, and the unit includes pin-adjustable IDE-to-SCA adapter cradles that let you use IDE hard drives to create any type of RAID array you like.

The Test Center used four 250-Gbyte Matrox hard rives in a RAID 5 configuration, which allows for the hot-swapping of a failed drive and provides a total storage space of about 700 Gbytes. The four drives can also be set up in a less-secure RAID 0 configuration for a total capacity closer to a terabyte.

WHITE-BOX NAS CHASSIS NASolution NP1040 Price: $2,199 Xtore Extreme Storage (626) 956-0040 www.xtore-es.com Xtore's white-box NAS chassis features hot-swap power supplies and four hot-swap IDE drive bays. IDE-to-SCA adapter cradles let you use IDE hard drives to create any type of RAID array. This is a quick way for white-box builders to provide customers with NAS while letting you use whatever brand of hard you prefer, as many builders have business relationships with specific hard-drive vendors.

HARD DISK/CAPACITY Maxtor 7Y250 MaXLine Plus II Price: $415 (ESP) Maxtor Milpitas, Calif. (408) 894-5000, (800) 2-MAXTOR www.maxtor.com Featuring a healthy 250 Gbytes of storage, the Maxtor 7Y250 is one of the most roomy drives on the planet. The IDE drive provides more space than anything offered in SCSI or Serial ATA form. Compared with other IDE drives offering 250 Gbytes, the Maxtor drive proved the better performer in testing.