| Value |  4.5 | | Performance |  4 | | Ease of Use | 4 | | Overall Satisfaction | 4 |
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3 of 5 Ok NAS for the price. Tuesday, September 02, 2008
A Customer from Seattle, WA
There's not much to complain about the product given the price. Could have been better if NFS support is more stable, and the fan could be less noisy. Plugin support from Promise is non-existant. They don't even allow configuration of the Download Center plugin. No feedback on the status of the torrent that you're downloading, it stays at 0%.
If you're looking for a cheap NAS box to stash some drives and use it with your Windows machine, this is OK. Want to use it with Linux/Mac? A little less worthwhile. Want to use it as a media download client / DLNA server? Don't bother. There's no UI to move your downloaded file to the DLNA share folder. You have to manually move it via mount points which is pointless. Was this review helpful?  
5 of 5 Promise NAS delivers as promised Saturday, August 04, 2007
A Customer from Boca Raton Florida
First off, It took me over 2 months to decide on this unit. There's a plethora of NAS boxes out there now and the choices aren't easy. Once I decided not to build my own server, (my SOHO doesn't need that much power yet). I ended up choosing between this unit and Infrant's. The latter has a great forum and is obviously a mature product, and does have more user flexibility. For example it allows the user to disable Oplocks. But with it's recent buy out by Netgear there is no telling if the support provided will continue at the same level. So, I decided on the NS4300n based on who the parent company is. Promise. The support has been great, the techs are in Ca., and setup was sweet and easy. It is truly plug in and go. The only worry I had was that the unit was so new. But, the 3rd firmware revision is pending, and ver2 works well. So that hasn't even been an issue. Obviously, Promise did their homework up front.
I haven't run any throughput tests on it. but haven't had to wait while accessing files and if the rest of your network will handle it the NS4300n does jumbo frames. I set it up RAID5 with some low dollar SATA2 160gb drives and probably have all of $650-$700 in the total package. For what it is, I've got a truly hot-swappable NAS. Nothing can come close to the value. Will I outgrow it. Absolutely. Do I think the Infrant Readynas NV+ is a bit more flexible? Could be.
But at the moment the market for NAS units is in a major transition. IMHO, there's really is no reason an empty box housing an imbedded 400Mhz CPU and RAID controller on a mobo, and a 100w PSU should cost more than a few hundred bucks or so. Today, barebone Athalon x2 computers cost about that. So, I'd expect that in a year or 2 most of these units will be using imbedded 1Ghz chips, have upgradeable RAM and firmware with tons of setup options. Like everything else electronic, as time goes on speeds go up, and prices come down.
In the mean time the Promise NS4300 has the best price point out there and firmware that's clearly put together by storage pro's. And after using it for 2 months, I'm sure I made the right decision. Was this review helpful?
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