Final Words & Conclusion

The verdict.

Right, it's time to wrap things up. We feel that Patriot made a nice entry into the niche market of NAS units. The device has good looks, is very easy to operate in terms of it's easy-to-setup GUI, but also simple stuff like the hot-swappable drive bays are a big plus in our eyes.

Next to that we have to admit that the low consumption of the Corza NAS storage unit is just silly (in a positive way). With one drive install we peaked at 18W. And in this time and age I have much respect for that. Add a second HDD and that number would go up by 5 to 10 Watts, which again remains impressive.

The not so good then, well two things really. First off, the Corza is a bit of a noisy product. It's as loud as a normal PC, so for the next product refresh I'd like to suggest to Patriot that they look into more advanced and silent cooling. The good thing about a NAS unit this size though is that you can tuck it away anywhere.

The second remark has to be performance. Here we have this lovely NAS unit with WD VelociRaptor HDD on a Gigabit link that is copying files back and forth towards a PC with a OCZ Vertex SSD at the speed of roughly 12MB~13MB/sec. I find that to be a little average, lukewarm at best so to say. Now since 12 MB/s is scarily close to 100 MBit/sec we initially figured that the device had bind itself at 100 Mbit/sec to the network. But after checking our gigabit switch, the readout reported that the 1000 Mbit/s link was up and running (on the client side (PC) as well). So keep that in mind, this device is good .. but certainly not the fastest kid on the block.

So what's the Corza good for ? Well, I see plenty of opportunities, I mean it's a NAS and these things are downright flexible in usage. But mainly it's a great file-server within your network. You can pump all your movies and music on it, and any PC within your LAN can easily access the data. Great stuff for say a home theater PC. In collaboration with a HTPC another thing comes to mind, the drives are hot-swappable. So if you like to remove and insert another HDD with content, you can do it on the fly.

For copying files and transporting media streams the roughly 100 Mbit/s of performance that you have available is more than enough for a high-definition stream. But also if you download a lot of stuff and want only certain PCs to access your download ... that's where this NAS unit shines as well. The users and group based management allows a lot of flexibility as to control who gets to access what data. But also think about functionality like making backups, stored away from the main PC. That in a nutshell is the power of NAS units.

Looking back, the Patriot Corza is a sufficient enough NAS unit and offers all basic NAS functionality you need plus a little extra. It's certainly not in the same league as say the QNAP NAS units. But then again it ain't priced 600 USD either. Priced right the Corza has a lot to offer; and that price is roughly three times cheaper than competing products, the Corza can be purchased for 150 USD.

In fact I even noticed a rebate at NewEgg offering this product at only 109 USD. For that kind of money this Corza is just an awesome deal, period.

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Bottom line: The Corza brings a fun NAS featureset to the table -- for little money, just don't expect massive HDD performance.