14 replies to this topic

[Nemo]

Today we take a look at the Cavalry Storage CAND3001T0 1TB Network Drive - http://www.overclock...lry_cand3001t0/

[Bosco]

This by far has to be one of the most text based reviews that has ever been done here at OCC

Nice Review Dale

[Nemo]

Thanks guys! These reviews have turned out to be a lot more involved than I expected and there's an awful lot of work that goes into them. I have a lot more respect for the regular review staff as a result. In the process though, I may have ticked ClayMeow off since he was the one who had to edit the review

[jhirsch123]

Wow,
That was an excellent review. Great job!

I'm considering this unit as a way to FINALLY do what I've been saying I would for years and get a simple network backup solution and I was wondering if you guys could give your thoughts on some questions that came up....

1) They don't really offer any way to notify you if one of the drive fails, and I would think a simple email notification could be very simple. Do you think this is a feature that could be added with a firmware upgrade?

2) They have a "warranty broken seal"... Do they expect you to send the unit in so they can replace a drive if one should fail? Secondly, would any 500 GB drive or bigger work? Would it have to be the same make, etc? A big seller of this unit is to be able to run a mirror setup - but what good is that if you don't know when it fails, or it isn't simple/practical to deal with the issue when there is a failure, right?

3) I was kind of disappointed by the transfer speed rates. I suppose I could deal with a 36 GB/hour transfer rate since populating the device would just be a one-time deal.... But what is the point of having Gigabit Ethernet, capable of ~ 125 Megabytes per second, if it doesn't even come close to that? Would the performance be the same if it was dealing with 100 megabit?

Thanks again,

Cheers ,

Jon

[Nemo]

1) Yes - the email notification could be fixed/enhanced with an firmware upgrade if they so chose
2) Yes, they expect a failed unit to be returned to them for repair under the warranty period - the only exception they will make is if you provide written proof from a qualified data recovery service that the unit was opened for that purpose. As in any RAID array it is best to replace a failed drive with an identical make/model. While dissimilar drives might work, it is always best to stick with the same manufacturer and model.
3) Using a 100Mb connection would hamper your transfer speeds, although I doubt it would by 1/10 of gigabit rates. The 125MB/s speed for GB Ethernet is a theoretical limit and you are not likely to see that in any real world application. I'm currently testing a much more expensive NAS box with four drives, faster processor and 512MB of memory it only approaches 13-18 MB/s in the directory copy test.

Edited by Nemo, 25 February 2009 - 06:05 PM.

[dr_bowtie]

I was really into looking at one of these for my back up and storage needs as well (nas box thread)

But after searching and reading only god know how many threads I am still not happy with the transfer speeds of NAS boxes...

Even the revised HP media Smart server is 65/40 down and up and thats one of the better ones...

I ended up building my own with a mATX board and a cheap AM2 dual core and with XP loaded and running I get right at 100ms/s down and up on a gigabit network...

I like the looks and the size of NAS boxes but I think they still have a way to go to match speeds of a small PC

[Nemo]

Would the performance be the same if it was dealing with 100 megabit?

I couldn't answer this question without running some more tests, so I hooked the CAND3001T0 to a 100Mb/s switch and ran one trial on a RAID 0 - EXT3 file system setup. On average, running on a gigabit connection is 53% faster than over a 100Mb/s connection. Hope that helps.

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[jhirsch123]

I couldn't answer this question without running some more tests, so I hooked the CAND3001T0 to a 100Mb/s switch and ran one trial on a RAID 0 - EXT3 file system setup. On average, running on a gigabit connection is 53% faster than over a 100Mb/s connection. Hope that helps.

Excellent info... thanks a lot. It sounds like the nas box is the way to go if I'm not too concerned about speed and want a small, simple solution. I'm curioius to know about the small PC. I have a couple older ones lying around that I could probably resurrect. If I recall, I even have one of those Promise ATA66 cards I think, which if I recall, can handle Raid 1... What kind of processing capability, Ram, etc. would you need to surpass the performance of the CAND3001T0? I know that's a specific question with many different answers, but just in general.

I ended up building my own with a mATX board and a cheap AM2 dual core and with XP loaded and running I get right at 100ms/s down and up on a gigabit network...

I guess a better question would be, what were the specs of the above mentioned PC? Also, you mentioned 100ms/s... was that 100 megabits? megabytes? per second?

[Nemo]

I would say just about any processor would do for RAID 0/1, it doesn't take that much processing power and 512MB of RAM would work just fine. That couupled with the Promise card would provide fairly decent performance.

[jhirsch123]

I would say just about any processor would do for RAID 0/1, it doesn't take that much processing power and 512MB of RAM would work just fine. That couupled with the Promise card would provide fairly decent performance.

When you say decent do you mean well in excess of what the Cavalry NAS will do? or about as good?

Thanks again,

Jon

PS. If I give that route a shot, I'll do some testing for the cause!

[rlimaye]

I have a network with domain. If I install this this NAS on my network, can all the machines in domain communicate? You have mentioned that by default it joins "WORKGROUP".
Right now I am not worried about security as long as all my domain PCs cann access the drives by mapping to the public folder. Can you please confirm?
Does it support Active Directory user accounts and groups?
Thanks