Promise Technology Offers Digital Media Server

Promise's NAS media server offers cost-conscious businesses and home office users power and performance while reducing the amount of power needed to run it.

Promise Technology, known as the originator of SATA/ATA redundant array of inexpensive disks (RAID) products, announced a digital media server aimed at small business and home office users, the SmartStor NS4600. The server, priced at $399 and available through retail and reseller channels, offers cost-conscious business owners support for up to four SATA 3G Hard Drives (not included) in a streamlined package. 

The NS4600 network attached storage (NAS) server is built on Intel's EP80579 Processor running at 600 Mhz, includes 256MB of double data rate (DDR) 2 Memory, one Ethernet port, two USB 2.0 ports and one eSATA Port. With Jumbo Frames disabled, the company said end-users should expect sequential write performance to average in the mid 30's megabit per second (MB/s) and sequential read performance to average in the mid 40's MB/s.

The NS4600 also features a sleek, updated design with blue LEDs and a "No Power Supply Fan." The internal power supply has been removed and replaced with an external power adapter that snaps into the bottom of the NS4600 and is secured by a removable door. The company claims the server is one of the quietest storage devices on the market today. The NS4600 also offers support for RAID 0, 1, 5 and 0+1 that is accompanied by high performance over Gigabit Ethernet.

"Connected home and small office users are demanding more intelligent and versatile storage solutions at cost effective prices," said Seth Bobroff Intel's general manager of server platforms group, storage. "The Intel EP80579 processor enables Promise to deliver a high performance, energy efficient Network Attached Storage solution with rich multimedia and small business features to help customers more easily share, protect and manage the huge growth of digital content."

With the launch of the NS4600, Mac users have the ability to backup multiple Macs via the home or office network to the NS4600. Promise's SmartNAVI Management GUI is also available for Mac and Windows, allowing end-users to perform tasks from the desktop. Upon first-time setup consumers use SmartNAVI to configure their volume using "One Click Setup" or "Advanced Setup". "Advanced Setup" includes the option to choose your own RAID mode.

Whether users select "One Click Setup" or "Advanced Setup", SmartNAVI will automatically format the volume using the appropriate file system after the volume has been created and initialized. SmartNAVI also features e-mail notification, enclosure management (reporting fan speed, temperature and voltage), a media player and photo album, a SmartSync backup tool with one touch backup and volume management.

Billy Harrison, Promise's product manager for CE products, NAS and DAS, said users are rapidly transitioning to notebooks and netbooks as their primary computer in the home and in the office. "Notebooks and netbooks are limited in terms of internal storage leaving the average end-user scrambling to expand their storage for backup of valuable data and digital content," he said.