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

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.