Armed with new a new GUI and priced very competitive Promise offers the SmartStor series NS4600 NAS unit with four swappable HDD bays, RAID functionality, eSATA, Gigabit Ethernet, USB (2.0) and then a heap of software functionality that blows you away completely. I mean this thing can download torrents, has an FTP server, a MySQL server, a WEB server, built-in media center, torrent download client and iTunes Server. It's compatible with all major OSes and sure of course has user and group based management as well.
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There is something in-between the NAS and standalone HDD enclosures, and we call that technology DAS -- Device Attached Storage, for the consumer market quite a new phrase to learn and understand. Today we test one, yes it will be more expensive as a normal HDD enclosure yet much cheaper than a NAS device, the unit we look at today for example is aesthetically very pleasing, can hold four high performance drives in hot-swappable drive bays, it is really fast, energy efficient, silent and comes with a plethora of connectivity towards your PC, like eSATA, USB, FireWire (400/800), of and I'd almost forget it .. is RAID 0|1|5 compatible.
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