Configuration
The setup interface is clean and simple
The included CD contains a tool to locate the IcyBox on the network and provide either DHCP or static IP information.
Once the initial setup has been completed, further configuration takes place through the web browser. The web interface is simple, easy to navigate, and puts complete control of the device at your command.
Setting up a 2TB volume takes around 20 minutes, regardless of format. Once the volume has been created, the drive can be accessed through the network. By default, folders are created for administrative and user shares. Mounting a share to a local volume works just like a shared folder from another computer.
Performance
Test Setup
Hardware:
- Tagan IcyBox IB-NAS4220-B
- 2x 1TB Seagate 7200.11 SATA hard drives
- Asus W2Pb laptop
- Intel Core 2 Duo T7200
- 2GB DDR-2 667MHz
- Western Digital Scorpio 250GB 5400rpm SATA HD (Reference Drive)
- Gigabit Ethernet
Software:
- SiSoft Sandra
- Atto Disk Benchmark
Benchmark Results
For benchmarking purposes, the IcyBox was connected directly to the computer using the gigabit Ethernet connection via crossover network cable. This provided the best performance results since a gigabit router was not immediately available.
As you can see, the best combination of drive configurations is ext2 and Span. While ext3 provides a more robust filesystem thanks to its journaling capabilities (the primary feature distinguishing it from ext2), this creates an overhead that the IcyBox cannot overcome. Also of note is the reduced performance in both RAID-0 and RAID-1. The documentation states simply that the two RAID levels do not provide additional performance since there are other limitation factors (mainly network performance).
Reading throughput for the IcyBox runs between 12 and 31 megabytes per second. Writing speeds are between 6 and 14 megabytes per second. Access times are between 26 and 32 milliseconds.
At first glance, theTagan IcyBox’s performance numbers look way too low. Two SATA drives, especially in a RAID-0 configuration should perform far better than what the benchmarks show. In fact the hard drive in my laptop (a Western Digital 250GB 5400RPM SATA-150 drive) clearly outperformed the two drives in the Tagan box. The thing to remember here is the speed of the network. Most people with a home network use a 10/100 router – providing a maximum speed of 100 megabits per second (Mb/s), which translates to 12.5 megabytes per second (MB/s). 802.11G users top out at 54 Mb/s, or 6.75 MB/s. Relatively few people run gigabit Ethernet in their homes at the moment, but their performance tops out at 1000 Mb/s, or 125 MB/s. Also, these are theoretical limits. Actual results are almost always below these maximums. While those few people with a gigabit or faster network will witness the true performance ceiling of the NAS4220-B, most will not.
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