Closer look & testing
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The unit is colored mostly in black. The front side of the device has silvercolored mesh and the small icybox logo.
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A closer look of the product shows us the basic design. Inside the metallic case we see a small circuit board which is basically a small computer. There is also space for a 3.5″ SATA hard disk. There is one ethernet connector, one eSATA connector, and USB connector to allow attaching the device to either your computer or network. The ethernet connector is based on 100Mbps standard allowing enough transferspeed for basic home use.
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The device is managed via the internet browser. Just type the hostname or IP-address of the device to your address bar and you’re ready to setup. You can make basic adjustments in the web interface, including user accounts, enabling and disabling services and changing network options. The device can act also as DHCP-server in case your network doesn’t have one already.
Testing:
We used following setup in order to test the device.
Intel Core E4500
4GB RAM
MSI P43 Motherboard
500GB Seagate HDD
Radeon 3870
Cisco Catalyst 5000 network switch
First we tested the performance in network use. We get around 10MBps speeds which is kind of a maximum to achieve in 100Mbps network. However we did some practical tests too and saw that the device allowed 10MBps transferrates only to one direction. When downloading and uploading files simultaneously to the device we saw only 5MBps speeds to both directions. The device worked in full-duplex mode, so it seems that the cpu of the device isn’t powerful enough to give enough performance for hard use. Also to remember is that FAT32 filesystem is the only one supported in networkdrive use on this device. Tests were made using windows network sharing and FTP transfers. We did not see any performance difference between the two test methods.
In USB-hard disk use the drive was a lot faster than in ethernet use. This is no suprise as USB2 has bandwidth of 380Mbps compared to the networks 100Mbps. We achieved speeds of 32MBps in USB-use which is slower than the hard disk could achive in native SATA-use, but definitely faster than in ethernet use. However, keep in mind, that ethernet use gives more use for the device allowing multiple computers to use the same device. We used HDtach 3.0 to test the device when connected via USB.
Conclusion:
External hard disks are quite common nowdays. Usually external disks are attached with USB-connector, however if you want to use the same disks in more than one computer at the same time, ethernet connected disks are your thing. Raidsonic IB-NAS902 provides enough performance for occasional home use. You can also connect the device to USB- or eSATA connector for better performance. I could recommend IB-NAS902 to anyone who is buying external hard drive for their home-network.
Pros:
+ Ethernet, eSATA and USB-connectors
+ Easy to use
Cons:
- Performance in ethernet use
- Ethernet use supports only FAT32 filesystem
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