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The Promise Technology SmartStor NS4600 is quite a slick looking NAS device, and while I would not rave about the looks, it does appear quite modern. The design features a number of curves and smoothed edges, which give it a rather unique look and feel. While the front and right hand side of the SmartStor NS4600 is black, the rest of the unit is actually silver, which produces quite a cool effect.   Helping to make the SmartStor NS4600 look a little more modern are the large number of blue LED lights, which thankfully are not all that bright, so the activity lights won’t go turning your office into a night club. The front door, and I say door as it opens as a door does, has two unusual air vents in it, these do distract from the design somewhat and they are on the front which is a little unfortunate.  Pushing air through the SmartStor NS4600 is a single low-profile 80mm fan, which we found to be very quiet when operating. Cool air is drawn in through the rear of the case and exhaled out the two vents located in the case door. Interestingly, while the case door vents appear to have dust filters, the fan grill where the air is sucked into the case does not. What we found most remarkable about the design of the SmartStor NS4600 was its size, this 4-bay NAS device is tiny. Amazingly it measures just 18.8cm tall, 15.2cm wide and 22.3cm long, while the total weight without hard drives installed is just 2.5kg. This is impressive, as the Synology DS409 which is also a 4-bay NAS device measures 18.4cm tall, 16.8cm wide and 23cm long. Although this does not sound like much, it means that the Synology DS409 does in fact have a considerably larger foot print.   However, what makes the size of the SmartStor NS4600 even more remarkable when compared to the Synology DS409, is that it also houses the power supply within the unit where as the DS409 features an external power supply. These power supplies are actually quite large, and we often find it annoying having to tuck the version that comes with the Synology units out of the way somewhere.  Moving on, there is no forward mounted I/O connectivity on the SmartStor NS4600 as everything is out back, which is not all that uncommon for a NAS device. Around the back we have a pair of USB 2.0 ports, a single eSATA port, and a Gigabit LAN port, along with the power supply connector.   Pulling the SmartStor NS4600 apart to show you the internal workings was a little fiddlier than we are used to, primarily because it is not meant to be taken apart. Where as many NAS devices that we have tested in the past require you to remove the case lid to install the hard drives, the SmartStor NS4600 is a little smarter about how it approaches this. Using hot-swap bays there is no need to remove the case lid, as drives can be quickly installed using the case door.   Eventually we did manage to break into the SmartStor NS4600, which will have likely voided our warranty, so we strongly recommend you do not do this, particularly given you have absolutely no need to. As the pieces slowly came apart we developed more and more of an appreciation for how well the SmartStor NS4600 is designed.   With the mainboard removed it was time to find out what makes the SmartStor NS4600 tick. It turns out that this NAS device is powered by an Intel EP80579 processor operating at 600MHz. While this is far from the most powerful processor we have found lurking inside a NAS device, it is a considerable step up from the Freescale MPC8343 400MHz processor of the older NS4300N model.  Helping out is 256MB of DDR2 memory, which is stuck directly to the PCB, making it impossible to upgrade the capacity. Again while we have come across NAS devices with far more memory, the 256MB capacity of the SmartStor NS4600 should get it by. Of course there is also a Promise controller featured in the NS4600, as it makes use of the FastTrak PDC42819 RAID controller, which as you guessed supports four SATA ports. |
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