Final Words & Conclusion

Final words and conclusion

What you guys need to understand is that the SmartStore NS4600 is way beyond what a typical NAS normally should be. The NS4600 is evolving from a standard NAS towards a lifestyle storage unit. The NS4600 as such will get you all the basics like user and group control of your files and content with or without limits. Next to that it is a box that is highly configurable in terms of HDDs capability. You get RAID 0,1,5 functionality bringing some extra value into this little NAS unit. One remark though, I would like to have more and wider ranged RAID configurability and migration options. One fun fact, it does support hot-spares as well. So if one drive fails, the hot spare could automatically kick in and migrate.

During my research I noticed there have been some reported issues with a RAID5 HDD failing after which all of the content was not repairable. It seems that 1.5 TB drives where not yet 100% supported. This is solved with the new units. My recommendation on that one would be three or four 1.5 TB drives. We are not sure about 2TB drive support, until that is confirmed by Promise we recommend a maximum of 1.5TB per HDD if your intent for this device is running backups.

Speaking of backups ... it's something this device does so well. The ease and comfort of your precious data being stored outside the system backed up over the Ethernet is just fantastic. Again we see nice configurability here as well; we can schedule backups from the server side (NAS) of things making it a standalone unit operating all by itself.

Performance wise the NS4600 is good. We reached fairly high transfer speeds over our Gigabit Ethernet connection and though Ethernet will always bring in some performance and lag issues over a direct connection like eSATA, I must admit that I liked what I saw, it's plenty fast for all your activities. On the GUI and OS side of things we can say that the NS4600 is responsive and fast.

With the most important stuff out of the way we land at the rest of the features and functions. You'll have your FTP server, you can upload images and music, make slideshows out of it and show it on the web server of the device. You can stream DLNA (Digital Living Network Alliance) as the NS4600 can be automatically discovered by Digital Media Players (DMP), Digital Media Renderers (DMR) and Digital Media Controllers (DMC) allowing Pictures, Music and Video to be shared instantly at any time at home. Sony's Playstation 3, Sony's Bravia Series LCD HDTVs, Pioneer's Elite Series Blu-Ray Player, Samsung's 750 & 850 Series LCD HDTVs and Nokia's N95 8GBTM SmartPhone are all DLNA Certified Devices that are capable of streaming content instantly from the SmartStorTM NS4600.

The NAS can act as an iTunes server, with your mobile or say Apple iPod Touch you can stream music over Wifi. You can share files over the internet if you wanted to, and the list goes on and on. Keep in mind though that everything on this box is targeted at consumers. Though you can access the WEB directory and make your own website, control and configuration over say the MySQL server is annoying as there's no low-level support for that.

Who even thinks of making a torrent download server inside the box ? You insert a .torrent file in the Download Station option and all of the sudden the NS4600 is downloading content from the internet. It's nearly crazy to witness, how nice is that.

And with that said we are going to close to review. There are plenty more options and features available and even on-route as the Promise software team working on the GUI is far from being done. Soon it will be even possible to take a photo on your mobile phone, send it to the NS4600 and the NS4600 will login to your Facebook account and upload the photo. It's that kind of functionally that Promise is working on hard, and that's the reason why we here at Guru3D would rather call it a LifeStyle storage and streaming box. The Promise NS4600 with updated software definitely promises a lot. We like what we saw for hardware, software and functionality. The overall performance is good, it is Gigabyte Ethernet compatible and we feel the price is fair as well.

As such the SmartStor NS4600 is definitely recommended for the consumer side of the market, for professionals making backups and relying heavily on drive migration and seeking more advanced RAID array it's a slightly different story, but this unit is not intended for that segment of the market anyway. Other then that, this just is an incredibly fun box.

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