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ICY BOX NAS Enclosure

Author:	Matthew Homan
Date:	2008.04.02
Topic:	Storage
Provider:	Icy Box
Manufacturer:	Icy Box

ICY BOX IB-NAS4220-B

WWW.ICYBOX.DE

Introduction

With energy costs on the rise the thought of running a NAS device rather then a dedicated server or a beefed up PC for file sharing at home or work is becoming popular. The average NAS device runs one or two hard drives (usually not included, so the consumer can choose the size of the drives) and it runs a LINUX operating system with a web page interface for management. It also comes with a network interface which lately is Gigabit capable. The Gigabit interface will come in very handy for file transfers as long as your router or switch as well as PC are both also operating at Gigabit speeds. Some of the more expensive NAS devices come with so many features that users can offload average tasks such as running FTP for hours on end, sharing out a printer for other PC on the LAN to print to, RAID for redundancy, and media server just to name a few. All of these tasks can be handed off to the NAS device which will use a fraction of the electricity of a PC. It is also always available as opposed to when you power down your main PC rendering others on the network(s) who want to print or retrieve a file helpless. The friends at ICYBOX.de sent us their IB-NAS4220-B NAS to review. Let’s see what this device can do for us.

Specifications

Take a look at these affordable NAS devices below:

ICY BOX IB-NAS4220-B

WWW.ICYBOX.DE

Click on photo for larger view

Setup

The IB-NAS4220-B came with the power brick, a RJ45 patch cable, the Chassis and a CD. There isn't really much to a NAS device which is good news for those with little PC or building experience as it will be very easy. If you have ever played with LEGOs, then this is not much more difficult. TechwareLabs will be installing two SATA hard disk drives of 1000Gigs (1 Terabyte) in size (Model HD103UJ by SAMSUNG). The drives run at 7200rpm/32m and are extremely silent even under load. The only tool needed is a #1 Phillips screwdriver to open the NAS device. Once TWL had it open we marveled at the simplicity of the design. Seen in the photos below, the heart of the IB-NAS4220-B is a circuit board the size of a dollar bill. The case is pure aluminum to assist with heat dissipation (what little there is from the HDDs). The mounts for the HDDs consist of a rubber bushing designed to cut down on any vibration produced by the HDDs. The kit comes with specially design screws, so don’t lose any! The two SATA cables, network cable (Cat 5e), and the power cable is also included so scrambling for special cables will not be of your concern once you get your hands on one.

Once the hard disk drives were installed the case reassembled (four small Phillips head screws), the NAS was plugged into the network and provided power. The sound of two HDDs was heard at first but once there were at speed, we could no longer hear them. The chassis fan was heard though faint in comparison to a standard PC’s case fans. The CD ROM was inserted into a lab PC and the setup was run. The software was nothing to write up as it just provided a search and configure feature to assist you with finding the NAS on your network and giving it a static IP address. We have provided a few screen shots for those of you who are curious about the initial software config.

Setup Continued

Take a look at these affordable NAS devices below:

ICY BOX IB-NAS4220-B

WWW.ICYBOX.DE

Setup Continued

A bit of knowledge about networking and IP addressing is required to setup some of the advanced features but overall setup is rather easy. Once the IB-NAS4220-B was given a static IP, we opened our internet browser and typed in the static IP. After logging in we were provided the main page to manage the IB-NAS4220-B. The menu and configuring the IB-NAS4220-B was very easy. The menu is very straight forward when it comes to options. The system part of the menu gives you options on the health IB-NAS4220-B itself. The network services gives you the options to run DHCP from the IB-NAS4220-B rather then maybe your PC or your highspeed modem. The other two options under the Network Service is the Bonjour and Twonky Media options which gives you the functionality to use the IB-NAS4220-B a media device with iTunes and Twonky media. See Twonky's website for details here. The maintenance menu gives you the options for configuring the local storage, updating the firmware of the IB-NAS4220-B with ease. Finally the Log File part of the menu gives the user insight into what the IB-NAS4220-B is doing.

The first step was to configure the local drives in a RAID set of our choosing. The IB-NAS4220-B has several options here which include mirroring (RAID 1), striping (RAID 0), Span (NRAID), and JBOD for those of you who have different size drives. TWL chose mirroring which essentially took our two 1 Terabyte drives (2 Terabytes of possible storage) and mirrored them giving us 1 Terabyte of storage. TWL chose this option because the data that will be stored on this NAS will be very important to the user so when one of the drives fails, the other drive will have a mirror of the data and the NAS will continue to run without hindering the performance. Now the IB-NAS4220-B will provide a beeping alarm to inform the user to check out the main webpage to find out what the alarm is about. The other RAID options are just as handy, just be sure investigate which RAID configuration best fits what your going to use the device for.  

Permissions and shares can setup from the menu to give users the ability share folders on the network via NFS and SAMBA. So those of you who are looking for a NFS device to host your shares for LINUX and be accessable to Windows OS and MAC's. Also for those of you who use BitTorrent to download files and leave your PC up for hours or days to get that one file that is taking forever, the IB-NAS4220-B is designed to support the BitTorrent packages allowing you to queue up file after file on the IB-NAS4220-B and then shutting down your PC. This is great for those of you who only have a laptop and need to take it with you.

Conclusion

The IB-NAS4220-B is a very handy NAS device with quite a few features that can be very helpful and convienant for the home and small business users. The options such as NFS and SAMBA makes the IB-NAS4220-B more attractive to the mixes operating system environments which include LINUX, MACs and Windows. The low power consumption, low noise, and little amount of heat produced from the device are also very attractive features for those of you who are looking for the best option that fits all three of those categories. The added features such as Twonky, and iTunes support may appeal more to the home users where the unlimited number of shares and users able to access them is more attactive to the business users. In conclusion the IB-NAS4220-B has few more features than the NAS devices of the past and although the list of features may appeal to some users, more features would make the IB-NAS4220-B a little more appealing.

Take a look at these affordable NAS devices below: