Friday, May 25, 2012

Seagate NAS - Not ready for prime time.

We purchased a 2TB Seagate Black Armor NAS for some things at work. It turns out to have some big issues.

2TB - advertising vs reality.
The device has 2 internal hard drives, each about 1 Terabyte in size. The default configuration as shipped is to mirror the drives (RAID 1), which means that you actually get a 1 TB storage device. If you span the disks (spread your data across both of them), you can get 2 Terabytes, but you geometrically increase the failure rate when doing so. You're better with a single 2 TB drive, which is NOT this device.

Global access - broken
In order to be able to access your files "from anywhere" you have to set up an account on the Seagate Global Access site.
The site took my username and password, and apparently remembers it, but won't let me log in.
It's the middle of a business day, and the support people are apparently out to lunch. (Returning at 1PM?)

This is not the type of 24x7 bulletproof option that we expected from the Seagate brand. We'll probably be returning this item.

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