Seagate BlackArmor NAS 440 user reviews (4TB)

Pros It looks nice. Hot swap drives but never tried to hot swap. I doubt I will attempt it.

Cons It is slow. The GUI is slow. The backups are slow. Building a RAID array is slow. The network transfers are slow. The connection via USB is slow.
It is not reliable.

Summary This unit is NOT reliable at all. This is my second unit. Seagate replaced the first one. I had a problem initially where I could not read the files from the unit. I could see the folder structure but kept getting an error when I tried to open a file. Contacted support. After hours of troubleshooting, took hours because they could not install the new firmware that was available, they said to return the unit. Got the second one, updated the firmware, copied the outdated files to the NAS. Everything was fine until now. The Blackarmor just had a stroke. It is doing the same thing as last time and guess what, the latest firmware which was recently released cannot be applied to the unit again. I hate this unit. I have lost all confidence in Seagate. Their products have slowly become less and less reliable. I never had so many Seagate drives fail on me before either. I will no longer buy their products. WD just got a new customer.

Pros Sleek, compact unit. Removable/replaceable fan is a nice touch. The hard drive trays slide easily and snap in place firmly. The included 10 PC license of Acronis TrueImage is a nice value add.

Cons Firmware, firmware, firmware. Slow EXT3 filesystem. Disk writes over CIFS are abysmal. No access to clear file locks without rebooting. Slow web interface. Periodically gives bogus alerts when doing NAS to USB backups.

Summary Based on the nice hardware profile and positive reviews on CNET, I was looking forward to my new Seagate NAS. Not to mention, I was replacing a full blown Windows 2003 server and was looking to recoup the cost of the first year in electricity alone. Bear in mind, I'm comparing the performance of this unit to an HP DL 380 server with hardware based RAID running Windows 2003. There is NO comparison. Write performance in a RAID 5 configuration is horrible. Combine this with lackluster performance of the EXT3 filesystem when accessed over the CIFS protocol and to say I'm disappointed is an understatement. Seagate gives you no option to tune the performance of the NAS based on the work you're going to perform. I personally would have preferred the choice of filesystem (ZFS or XFS maybe) to deal with the large files I'm storing on the NAS.