You also must consider the protocols you'll be using for data access. All the NAS devices we tested provide the common file-system-sharing protocols: NFS (Network File System), CIFS (Common Internet File System, or Windows shares) and Apple access. Other forms of access, such as legacy NetWare shares, FTP access and HTTP access, are more often found on higher-end units, though some of the devices in our review do provide access to these protocols.
We chose the Snap Appliance Snap Server 4500 as our Editor's Choice because of its complete feature set, speed and expandability. The Snap Server was the hands-down winner in most of our tests and supported all the access shares and functions we were looking for. When you factor in best-in-class expansion capabilities, external disk arrays, a good price and a great warranty, you have a winner.
The Snap Server 4500 is an excellent product whose great hardware features, easy setup and superb performance made it easy to name it the Editor's Choice winner.
The Snap Server 4500's feature set is impressive. The device's hardware includes a 2.4-GHz Intel Pentium 4 processor with 512 MB of RAM. An external SCSI port allows the addition of either an external tape backup unit or two of Snap Appliances' Snap Disk 10-disk expansions. These expansions bring the unit's maximum capacity up to 3 TB--more than any other device in our review. The base chassis allows two raw capacity configurations: 640 GB or 1 TB. The 4500 uses parallel ATA disks (as do all but the InoStor ValuNAS 6000, which uses serial ATA). Usually, we prefer the serial ATA drives, but given this machine's excellent overall performance, we really can't complain.
Unlike older products from Snap Appliance (formerly an operating division of Quantum), which ran on an operating system the company called SnapOS, the Snap Server 4500 uses a Linux-based operating system, GuardianOS. We saw an improvement in both the functionality and the responsiveness of the Web-based UI, which looked much like SnapOS.
We were also pleased that the Snap Server 4500 comes with Computer Associates' eTrust Antivirus software, as well as an unlimited user license for PowerQuest's DataKeeper software for automatic backup and restore of Windows clients. The Snap Server also will accept backup clients for Legato Software's Networker, Veritas Software Corp.'s Backup Exec and NetBackup, and CA's BrightStor ARCserve and BrightStor Enterprise.
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