Meet the Promise SmartStor DS4600 - Product gallery

Alright .. so here we have the unit unpacked. Our box was a little beaten up from traveling overseas from the USA toward the Netherlands. First impression nice looking device. Too bad it's not designed completely in black though.

Bundled you'll find everything you need to get started. Power cable, USB 2.0 cable, eSATA cable, Firewire 400 and 800 cable and even a eSATA lead that you can hook up towards your motherboards SATA ports. Next to that of course a manual. It's good to see that Promise did not skimp on the cables and merely delivers say, only a USB cable.

The front side of the DAS SmartStor DS4600 unit then -- looks a bit dull powered off really. You are looking at a drive bay door. Four drive bays sit behind that lockable front panel which has a lot of cool LEDs harbored in it. We'll show you that later on though,

The four hard drives will be configured in a RAID array; there is support for three RAID levels 0, 1, 5 and 10. However, even if all four drives are inserted, the SmartStor DS4600 external hard drive only allows you to treat them as one volume. You can't configure the four drives in two or more separate volumes or in multiple RAID arrays. 

The white plastic thingies are actually brackets for the HDDs and allow them to slide into the drive bays. We'll demonstrate this later on.