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Seagate BlackArmor NAS 440 review

£807.82 inc VAT

Manufacturer: Seagate

Our Rating: We rate this 3.5 out of 5

By | PC World Australia | 16 March 10

Seagate's first network-attached (NAS) device, the Seagate BlackArmor NAS 440, offers the ability to encrypt volumes, easily manage RAID arrays and administer users. However, it's not without its flaws.

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Seagate's first network-attached (NAS) device, the Seagate BlackArmor NAS 440 (ST360005SHA10G-RK), offers the ability to encrypt volumes, easily manage RAID arrays and administer users. However, it's not without its flaws.

Seagate BlackArmor NAS 440: Performance

By default, the Seagate BlackArmor NAS 440 aligns all four 1.5TB drives in a RAID 5 array, providing 4.5TB of storage with one drive redundancy. We tested the NAS device's performance using this setup as well as both four-drive and two-drive RAID 0 configurations in order to place it on a level playing ground with competitors.

The Seagate BlackArmor NAS 440 was tested in the labs at PC World Australia.

We test all NAS devices connected through a Gigabit Ethernet network to a testbed PC with a 300GB Western Digital Velociraptor hard drive. We run Intel's NAS Performance Toolkit, which determines how the NAS device performs when streaming 720p high-definition media from the device as well as the ability to record the same video while performing backup operations.

We also run two file transfer tests to see how the NAS device performs in the real word. One file transfer test uses 3000 1MB files; this is intensive for both the hard drives and the embedded processor, and a good indication of how it will perform when backing up your computer. In addition, we transfer 20GB worth of 3-4GB files, a faster test that is similar to dealing with large videos, disk images or database files.

The Seagate BlackArmor NAS 440's default RAID 5 configuration naturally lags behind some of the other NAS devices we've tested, since it has to account for redundancy when writing data and performing simultaneous tasks. However, changing to a RAID 0 array - in both two- and four-disk configurations - didn't make a huge difference in performance. You'll get speedier results when writing large files, but overall the NAS device's ability to read data and stream content to other devices is on par with lower-powered devices like Synology's Disk Station DS409.

NEXT: our expert verdict >>

Seagate BlackArmor NAS 440 Expert Verdict »

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Post Review
NAS server
Host Connectivity: Gigabit Ethernet
Total Storage Capacity: 6TB
Installed Devices/Modules Qty: 4 (installed)/4 (max)
160x269x207mm
6.2kg
Status LCD
1.2GHz processor, 256MB RAM
RAID controller, Serial ATA-300
Hot-swap - 3.5inx 1/3H
4x 1.5TB, 7200rpm
Network adaptor
Ethernet, Fast Ethernet, Gigabit Ethernet
FTP, Bonjour
HTTP, HTTPS
Apple Bonjour Protocol, Microsoft CIFS, Network File System (NFS), FTP, HTTP, HTTPS
email alert, FTP server
  • Overall: We give this item 7 of 10 overall

Remote replication and performance are two big issues with the Seagate BlackArmor NAS 440, but there are still a number of positives to this NAS device. The clean user interface makes it easy to manage, while the tool-less drive trays and tightly integrated BlackArmor Backup software make single computer backups easy to implement for up to 10 simultaneous users.

There are currently no price comparisons for this product.
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