Network Computingwww.networkcomputing.com

	Issue TOC Print full article Print this page Download as PDF E-Mail this URL Discuss this article Flame the author     In this article Introduction Dell PowerVault 775N Excel Meridian Data NetStor MVD Hewlett-Packard HP StorageWorks NAS B3000 First Intelligent Array POPnetserver 8000 Procom Technology NetForce 1800 Executive Summary | Web Links How We Tested Report Card

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.