Tagan IcyBox IB-NAS4220-B review

Nick Mertes 16 Nov, 2008 at 1:51pm ET Article published in Tech

Tagan is a producer of power supplies, cases, and storage chassis for single and dual drives. Icrontic was offered the opportunity to test the IcyBox IB-NAS4220-B, a network attached storage (NAS) chassis that supports two SATA drives and offers a long list of features.

Tagan IcyBox IB-NAS4220-B features:

Black aluminum housing
Rubber feet to reduce vibration
Unlimited users and groups
Simple configuration via web GUI
Supports two 3.5″ SATA HDDs of any size
Gigabit Ethernet-ready
2x USB 2.0 ports for printers, external HDDs, and USB sticks
One-touch Backup
RAID 0, 1, Span (NRAID), JBOD
Seven servers in one
- Samba Server (for Windows network shares, MAC OS X)
- NFS Server (for Unix, Linux)
- FTP Server (remote access for file transfer from internet)
- DHCP Server (automatic network configuration)
- UPnP-AV (Twonky Media Server, 30 days test version)
- iTunes Support
Print serving
Quiet case – temperature controlled fan
Low power consumption

Initial Impressions

The IcyBox package contains the NAS, owner manuals, power adapter, and various fittings for drive mounting. Once removed from its packaging, the IcyBox unit’s front face features a power button and USB 2.0 port. The rear of the unit contains another USB 2.0 port, an RJ-45 jack, the power jack, a reset button for the embedded Linux installation, and a power switch.

The IcyBox

The complete box contents of the IB-NAS4220-B.

Removing the four screws on the bottom of the unit allows the internal carriage to be removed from the metal enclosure. Once removed, we find the inner workings of the NAS to be little more than the simple electronics and cooling needed to support an embedded Linux install and a pair of SATA drives.

IcyBox without the cover.

A look inside.

Hardware Installation

Drives mount easily to their container using special large head screws that attach to the drives side screw mounts through blue silicon vibration dampers.

With the bottom drive installed, a temperature sensor is attached to the top of the drive using tape provided in the accessories bag. The sensor controls the cooling fan automatically.