Barely expandable and underperforming, the FIA POPnetserver 8000 can't even lay claim to being the least-expensive NAS we tested. For those reasons, we can't recommend this unit to companies with minimal storage needs and small budgets.
The POPnetserver 8000 is the only ATA/IDE unit we received. It has no support for external storage, and came in a RAID 5 format: eight 250-GB Maxtor drives in hot-swappable carriers in the front of the 2U machine. Of those 2 TB, about 1.5 are usable, with 500 GB reserved for RAID 5's redundancy. We got a chance to use the hot-swap carriers, as disk one in the system developed a sector error soon after we powered up the machine. FIA's tech support send us a new drive overnight. We hot-swapped the drive and the array immediately began to rebuild.
Our test unit came with two 2.4-GHz Intel Xeon processors, 1 GB of memory and a whopping four network ports: two 10/100 and two 10/100/1000 copper Gigabit Ethernet ports. Unfortunately, they are not very clearly labeled and not laid out in an expected pattern. Power is supplied by separate sources in the form of two hot-swappable power supplies that can be accessed from the back of the machine. The unit also features three PCI 64-bit/66-MHz buses for the two IDE RAID cards and all four NICs. This should provide plenty of bandwidth for the NAS.
Unfortunately, the POPnetserver 8000 managed to lose out on just about every test we ran. It never captured a top spot, though it occasionally placed second. We attribute most of its performance issues to the IDE/ATA disks, rather than to the base NAS OS, the FreeBSD-based POPnet OS.
We liked the POPnetserver 8000's management interface. It was one of the easiest to understand and configure. The POPnetserver 8000 supports snapshots, server-to-server replication and graceful shutdown in the event of a UPS emergency with American Power Conversion UPS units. Regrettably, the POPnetserver 8000 does not support the NDMP backup protocol.
The POPnetserver 8000 comes with a three-year parts and labor warranty on a cross-shipment or carry-in basis. Although we find the price attractive, the lack of expandability and poor performance make us pass on this unit.
POPnetserver 8000, First Intelligent Array, (949) 940-6565, (888) 353-0337. www.fiainc.net
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Barely expandable and underperforming, the FIA POPnetserver 8000 can't even lay claim to being the least-expensive NAS we tested. For those reasons, we can't recommend this unit to companies with minimal storage needs and small budgets.
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