ioSafe N2 review

The ioSafe N2 is essentially a NAS enclosure built into a fire safe, able to protect your data against temperatures of up to 843 degrees centigrade for 30 minutes. It’s also waterproof, to protect against flood damage. As long as it’s sealed properly, your hard disks will survive being fully submerged in fresh or salt water up to a depth of three metres for 72 hours.

The ioSafe N2 also has a Kensington security slot, so you can secure it to protect it against theft, although its 150x230x292mm size and 12.7kg weight should be a fair deterrent too. However, it’s not really theft that this sturdy enclosure is built to withstand. The final key security feature is the $5000 (£3232) of guaranteed data recovery for your drives, no matter how your data was lost. You must register online to activate this feature.

The ioSafe N2’s front panel is a thick metal plate that you can open with a specially designed hex key. The key is designed to flex when you’ve screwed everything to the correct tightness, so even though you can use a standard hex key of the same size, you should hang on to it.

When the outer plate is removed, you can see the ceramic blocks that protect the ioSafe N2 against fire. At this point, you still can’t reach the drive bays as there’s another seal to open, a metal block with rubber washers and seals at all joining points that ensures your drives are protected against water damage even if the NAS is submerged. Behind this are the drive bays in which you can mount 3 1/2in or 2 1/2in drives. The bays don’t have the anti-vibration grommets we’re used to seeing on other high-end NAS devices, but they’re unnecessary as it’s impossible to hear any trace of drive noise through the N2’s layers of metal and ceramic. Specially designed vents keep the N2 cool under normal operation without compromising its environmental protection.

Once you’ve fitted the drives and re-secured the NAS’s external housing, all you have to do is power it up, plug it into your network, and use the Synology Finder application on the supplied CD to install the N2’s operating system. The Finder identifies the N2 as a Synology DiskStation 213. Like the DS213, the N2 has a USB port and an SDXC card slot at the front, and two USB3 ports and a single Gigabit Ethernet port at the back.

The NAS has 512MB of DDR3 memory and a 2GHz Marvell Kirkwood MV6282 processor. It’s not as powerful as the dual-core Atoms used in some high-end NAS devices we’ve seen, but it’s powerful enough to produce fairly quick transfer speeds in our throughput tests and make the N2’s web-based user interface feel quick and responsive. The user interface used is Synology DiskStation Manager (DSM), which is our favourite NAS operating system because of its clear icons and great online documentation. You can install lots of optional programs and services through it, and you can also create shortcuts on its home desktop page, quickly search for programs and settings and resize windows just like a regular desktop operating system.

Synology has just updated DSM to version 4.3, which adds a bit more polish to an already excellent user interface. New features include speed limit controls to throttle throughput speeds for specific users or groups, updates to the way its Cloud Station synchronisation handles changes to existing files and some extra features for its photo and video galleries.

The ioSafe N2 runs the excellent Synology DSM 4.3 operating system

To test the data transfer speed of the ioSafe N2 we installed two 3TB Western Digital Red disks and transferred files between it and a test PC. As this is a two-bay enclosure, you can choose between a number of different RAID types, including JBOD, RAID1, RAID0 and Synology Hybrid RAID (SHR), although SHR defaults to what is effectively a RAID1 volume.

It’s incredibly important to use RAID1 or similar to keep a redundant copy of the data you store on the ioSafe N2. If you instead opt for a configuration without redundancy, such as JBOD or RAID0, you’ll get more space, but all the fire and flood protection in the world can’t protect you against data loss through drive failure.

With the drives configured as SHR, the N2 produced a large file write speed of 65.6MB/s and read speed of 59.4MB/s in our SMB throughput test, making an average of 62.5MB/s. The small file test produced a write speed of 15MB/s, read of 18.8MB/s, making an average of 16.9MB/s.

We also configured the N2 as an iSCSI target, which lets a user use the device as if it’s a local disk, but it made little impact on our large file transfer speeds. In fact, they were a little slower, with a write speed of 58MB/s and read of 60MB/s. Small files copied across much more quickly, though, with a write speed of 45.9MB/s and read speed of 33.2MBs.

The ioSafe N2 is seems expensive when compared to a device such as the Synology DS213j, but if you store critical financial, design or corporate data, the N2’s disaster-proofing and recovery service could be the difference between life and death for your business. If data is your company’s lifeblood, then this the perfect Business Buy.