Seagate Business Storage 8-Bay Rackmount NAS (16TB) review

The Seagate Business Storage 8-Bay Rackmount network-attached storage (NAS) device is a full-length 1U rackmount unit capable of taking eight drives in its internal hot swap bays. Our review sample had a set of eight 2TB Seagate Constellation ES.3 HDDs preinstalled. In its default configuration, the NAS provided 13.8TB of storage and was capable of tolerating the failure of two drives. This device is also available empty, and in 8TB, 12TB and 32TB configurations, should you prefer a different capacity.

To open the drive bay, press two buttons on the underside of the NAS’s front panel. The NAS’s top panel pops open like a car bonnet to reveal all eight bays. Each drive is held in place by a clip, and you have to slide them out, which helps prevent accidental removal. In our hot-swap test, we were pleased to find we could remove and re-insert two disks without incurring the loss of our array or our data. We could even hot-swap the positions of disks without data loss, although we found that we had to reboot the NAS after one disk wasn’t properly detected after re-insertion. Although a broken array was initially reported, the NAS detected the disk and re-synchronised our array without loss of data after a couple of minutes.

The NAS has a rather more impressive hardware specification than most of the rival products we’ve reviewed, with a 2.3GHz dual-core Celeron G1610T processor and 4GB of error-checking ECC RAM. The system also has a pair of hot-swappable power supplies, either one of which can power the NAS should the other fail. A pair of LAN ports can be set up in a failover configuration so that your NAS always has a network connection. You can even restrict certain services, such as access to a specific iSCSI target, to one of the network connections.

A USB port at the front of the NAS lets you connect an external disk as a backup target or source. There are far more connection ports at the back, including two more USB ports, so you can connect a UPS comms lead, a printer, or more external storage. There’s also a serial port, PS/2 ports and a VGA graphics output. Although these imply you can connect the NAS to a monitor, mouse and keyboard, this option isn’t currently enabled, so you must access it remotely.

Some NAS devices let you download and install extra features, but Seagate has opted to keep things simple with a few core features that’ll cover the main requirements of many most businesses. You can enable, configure and control most of these via the Services tab in the General settings screen.

Here, you’ll find options to enable features such as DLNA media streaming, plus NFS, FTP and SFTP servers. By default, SMB file sharing is enabled, and you can easily add more public or private shares via the main Shares screen. The NAS also has a download engine, which can download files in the background from HTTP, FTP and BitTorrent sources. The NAS has its own backup configuration tool and also supports the Symantec NetBackup platform, which allows an rsync-compatible server to use the NAS as a backup target. You can also enable support for Apple’s Time Machine backup protocol.

It’s also in the Service screen that you can enable and disable the NAS’s support for Wuala Hybrid Cloud, a cloud storage service. Unfortunately, linking the device to the service is fiddly. You must install the Wuala client on a local Windows or Mac computer and then add the NAS as a device. You’ll then be able to access its public contents from any other Wuala client you’re logged into. This conspicuously lacks the elegance of rival NAS makers’ personal cloud servers.

The NAS supports RAID1, RAID5, RAID6, and RAID10, as well as volume configurations without redundant storage. However, our recommendation is to opt for Seagate’s default SimplyRAID configuration, which gives you protection against the failure of two disks in an eight-disk configuration. We tested the NAS’s transfer speeds using both a standard SMB share and an iSCSI target, which is mounted by a client PC as though it were a local drive, offloading much of the processing required during read-write operations.

In our SMB transfer speeds tests, the NAS produced some of the best results we’ve seen. Large files were written at 107.8MB/s and read at 98.4MB/s. Small files, always more of a challenge, wrote at 20.9MB/s and read at 29.7MB/s for an average of 25.3MB/s. Performance increased when we transferred data to and from an iSCSI target, with a large file write speed of 127.3MB/s and a read speed of 97.3MB/s. Small file throughput was also impressive with a write speed of 90.4MB/s and a relatively 43.93MB/s slow read speed.

At just 13p per gigabyte, the 8-Bay Rackmount NAS is great value. It has great performance and the preinstalled Constellation ES.3 disks are high-quality. The NAS’s £2,100 price means it may be too expensive for many small businesses, though, and some businesses may prefer a NAS with a wider range of features. Unlike rival products from Synology and QNAP, you can’t download and install apps to give you the tools you need to turn your network storage device into a security monitoring system, web server or IP telephony hub. Even so, if need a NAS designed for high-capacity, multiuser environments, you should consider the Seagate Business Storage 8-Bay Rackmount NAS.