Tagan Icy Box NAS4220 NAS Enclosure

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Tagan Icy Box NAS4220 NAS Enclosure

Over the past few years we have looked at several Tagan power supplies such as the TurboJet 1100W and BZ 900W. However, their product selection is no longer limited to power supplies and they now produce several different desktop cases as well as a growing selection of storage devices. These storage products are part of their Icy Box family, which consists of 2.5" and 3.5" hard drive enclosures as well as NAS (Network Attached Storage) devices. One of these products is the Tagan Icy Box IB-NAS4220-B, which is a two-drive SATA NAS with support for RAID 0/1/JBOD. What makes this device more interesting to us is that it runs Linux and Tagan is more than happy to let its customers modify the unit and write their own software.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=12476

[Sadhu]

Too bad they don't have 4 disk version . I just bought 4 sata2 disks and I'm looking for some box to host it as a NAS.

[l8gravely]

[QUOTE=phoronix;35213]Phoronix: Tagan Icy Box NAS4220 NAS Enclosure

So, how come there are no performance tests? And you don't say whether the device is Gigabit or not as well.

It's an interesting device, but the speed and reliability are of concern. Did you do a test where you ran the unit with a partially plugged in SATA cable, or where you pulled power to one drive while it was running?

Thanks,
John

[M1AU]

What I read about this product is that it should support gigabit ethernet, but some users report about slow transfer rates even when using in a gigabit lan. I have to say that they also using Vista, so one cannot tell if that may be the problem, seriously.

Even though it looks quite interesting to me and I'm looking for such a device for quite some time.

[december]

I think it's great that they added information to the manual about using the device in Linux, i.e. how to do NFS mounts and such. That and the fact it runs Linux itself, make me want to play with it.

It would be cool to hack it and possibly make it run rsync-over-ssh. I always set up backup systems this way; I only deal with Linux and *BSD servers, but I'm sure there are rsync clients for Apple OSX and Windows.

You could also run hdparm on it to spin down disks when they are idle. Since the system doesn't run from the disks, they shouldn't spin up by themselves until someone actually requests data over the network. Or you could script it to turn itself off when all computers in the local network are off.

If the OS image isn't too limited, you could do some very nice things indeed.