Final Words & Conclusion

Final words and conclusion

With the I-NA312N1 storage company iNEO  brings an affordable and good looking NAS unit top the consumer market. I deliberately say consumer market here as for corporate and even perhaps even SOHO environment this unit would likely not suffice. Make no mistake you get your moneys worth, however this product is what it is, and that is a simple to use NAS unit with at best 'okay' storage performance.

That topic performance was my biggest hassle with the I-NA312N1. We popped in a fast SSD to be able to precisely measure SSD read and write speed and that's where the I-NA312N1 compltely and utterly choked and bottlenecked due to a too slow processor. We got roughly a tenth out of the maximum performance of the SSD. Now please do understand that an Ethernet connection brings along lag and typically lower transfer speeds than eSATA and USB 3.0. But this should have been better.

The reality is also that the I-NA312N1 is not intended and designed to be a fast NAS unit. The unit is sufficient for normal usage and transfers. Say if you want to stream a 1080P HD movie from the unit to a HTPC, well that's not an issue as the bandwidth needed for that is achieved quite well. Storing (copying) a 1080P movie on that NAS however would take long, very long. So if you are on the lookout for massive NAS performance, steer clear of this one, it is not your cup of tea.

Performance aside from ground up the unit functions well. It's an easy to use and operate box and it makes a lovely low power media storage box. Installation of the HDDs is fairly simple and the software GUI that can be controlled with your browser is easy to understand and setup. You'll quickly make users, groups and if need assign specific storage shares onto the network.

So overall it's not the fastest device on the block, by far. But it is very handy, flexible and the web based interface is done proper. Priced right it could attack the average consumer as it definitely beats any USB attached storage device by a good margin with it's features and network accessibility alone.

The standard MSRP for I-NA312N1 is $129.99, and admittedly ... that really is a bargain. But remember you forfeit on storage performance bigtime.

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