Installation & Testing:

Working with the IB-NAS4220-B is very, very simple. Like any other drive enclosure, you simply remove a few screws to disassemble the unit. The screws are on the bottom of the unit between the feet. Once those are removed, the outer black housing simply slides off revealing the internal drive cage with the circuits connected at the rear.

Sliding Out The Chassis

Chassis & Drives

You can see that the fan is situated higher up on the back of the unit's frame and isn't obstructed in any major way. Air should be able to easily pass through the drives and over the circuit board. There are two red SATA cables that are situated so that they fit easily on the back of the drives without any need to twist or spin the connectors.

Installed

The drives are mounted horizontally one on top of the other. You can see that there are a couple of ways to mount the drives either by screwing in the drive screws manually, or by pre-attaching the rubber grommets and screws first. This way you can simply quickly slide the drives in and out. If you plan on removing the drives often enough, then this is your best choice. The grommets should help limit any noise caused by vibrations. Since I like to use Seagate perpendicular drives with the G-force protection feature, they are pretty much dead silent already. But, it never hurts to think ahead like Icy Box has done here.

Close Up

Once the drives are fastened and double checked, the internal cage simply slides back in and is fastened via four black screws on the bottom again. It really can't get any simpler unless it were a hot-swap style Back Plane unit. The major differences between this unit and one of those is price. You tend to pay bigger bucks for Back Planes and they're more configured for much more serious IT professionals. The IB-NAS4220-B is a healthy mixture of both Back Planes and end user features without the high cost.

The only glitch you might run in to is the famous Windows Firewall and it's magnanimous ability to block any and everything necessary for your network to function. Otherwise, the included software disc is also very, very simple to get set up. And if you don't use the software, you can connect to the NAS4220 via your browser and configure it that route.

Powered & Working

Now, transfer rates on the NAS4220 depends upon a few factors. One is whether or not you're using a SATA I or SATA II drive which effects the transfer burst rates. SATA II is the optimal drive of choice if you want better results. Also, there will be difference in transfer rates between the selection of RAID you choose. RAID 0 is obviously is a bit faster than RAID 1 as well as JBOD. And, if your network is a bit outdated, you may not obtain similar results since my own network is D-Link Gigabit.

Using Seagate SATA II 500GB 16MB hard drives, this particular RAID array experienced transfer rates pretty much expected due to the limited integrated memory. It would probably have been better if this were otherwise. But, then higher amounts of removable or upgradeable SDRAM will drive up the cost.

Working with a larger files revealed better FTP upload speeds averaged of course. These aren't bad results given what the NAS4220 has to work with. Naturally, your results will vary depending on the drives you use and RAID configuration.

If you remember, there's more that NAS boxes can do given that you can make use of Linux and other OS that'll allow you to reprogram, or flash, the integrated memory. Here are a couple screen shots of extra projects a friend of mine, code named: Hadaken, decided to try out. He's been a great tutor opening my own eyes to the potentials of NAS.

Dumping Activity Logs

Text Editing Custom Firmware

He's had the Icy Box for a few weeks and has set his up to do various things like use the system as a remote media player for his entire home, scan and convert documents to PDF as well as share them on the NAS. It's been also used as an image gallery where you plug your camera in which shows up as a Mass Storage Device where a press of a button copied the images from the camera and loaded them in to a web gallery built in to the new firmware. (Sweet!)

Average Transfer Rate (1010 KB/s)

This is just a simple screen shot of a transfer in progress to see what kind of speed a new build could achieve. It's optimized better than the stock firmware which is designed more for Windows users. Typically, anything I've ever used in Linux has been faster due to lower resource requirements. Tagan made it decent, but Hadaken made it better.

The one thing I found most interesting that a NAS unit like this is capable of is the use of encryption to protect the NAS content. You would need a key to access the NAS content. This is where a good USB stick comes in to play. It basically acts as a dongle, or data key, to gain access. Otherwise, the encrypted unit and it's contents would be pointless, including each individual drive if they were removed. (Extra Sweet!)

Seeing things like this at work make you wonder why a NAS unit would come with anything less than at least 256MB memory. I understand that more memory may mean a higher cost, but older SD memory shouldn't drive the price of any unit up much at all. It would also be nice to see memory slots rather than integrated memory. That way we could replace the memory stick if and when it goes bad. As matter of fact, more replaceable memory would open any NAS device up to more potential features as well as make them that much more attractive a storage solution.

Conclusion:

Until recently, I never thought about purchasing something like the Icy Box IB-NAS4220-B External NAS Enclosure. In fact, the only enclosures needed were for sheer back up. Then one day I thought to myself, it would be nice if I could access my files from any PC connected to the network. No more need for 3 or 4 separate external drive enclosures for each room with hard drives. It gets a little pricey when you have 3 or 4 systems. The NAS4220 really centralizes the storage need more efficiently.

So, why would Tagan leave off the eSATA port? Well, for one reason, the Icy Box isn't meant to be a simple external solution for just storing your drives and back up files alone. It's a Network Attached Storage solution with a more serious purpose of sharing and controlling storage space over your network. This is one reason why there isn't an eSATA port. If you just need eSATA, Tagan has really decent single and dual drive enclosures.

Also, rather than using the USB 2.0 ports for anything other than back up connections, I suggest you use the rear port for your print server. Leave your front opened for One Touch Backup when you need it.

As far as NAS devices are concerned, the Icy Box IB-NAS4220-B is priced at about $130 after a little Google searching. Lower priced units don't seem to come with much in terms of software or capable of larger storage drives. On the side of the NAS coin, there are some very similar NAS units pricing in at almost $100 more which makes the Icy Box that much more attractive a choice. As far as the cost to performance ratio goes, this is a decent unit and just needs a couple capable drives of your choice. I have no problem recommending the Icy Box to those who need just the basic features and a little extra help managing their storage space.

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