By Philip Churchill on February 19th, 2008
Norco DS-520G Network Storage Appliance Review
Back in October (2007) of last year we gave you details of the DS-520 Home Server NAS Appliance from Norco Technologies which is available as two separate models the DS-520F provides Dual 10/100 Ethernet and a 600MHz Processor whilst the DS-520G has Dual Gigabit Ethernet and a 1GHz Processor and in both instances the processor is an Intel ULV Celeron M.
For those of you after more information tech site ExtremeTech has posted a 4 page review for your eager eyes here.
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I said it way back when you first intro’d this model… I love it! The size is perfect, the case is so awesome… compact, and the 5 hotswap bays are just perfect, and I also love the dual rj45 ports… BUT, it’s too expensive. $599 for basically a bare bones system is way too much. If this thing were even $499, I’d probably still think it was a little pricey, but I’d have one in my house right now.
A very important issue that Norco and its retailers forget to mention is that if you want to exceed 2tb you need to run x64 flavors of Windows. And don’t forget, it’s joined at the waist to a workstation which has the sata pci card installed. And getting the drivers installed and functional can be a time-sink. And I lost a couple of drives when the fan seized up. I will stick to usb externals; however, I must mention that I had 2 Maxtors fry drives within 1 month because of seized fans…
I dumped my Norco for WHS recently and never looked back…will keep my Maxtors realizing that they are TEMPORARY storage devices that require daily temperature checks…
Correction: I re-read the review and saw that it was the NAS device; mine was the eSata.
My comment on NAS devices (I replaced a Buffalo raid 5 with the Norco eSata) is that i/o is extremely slow, much slower that my WHS, and I wouldn’t touch NAS again for that reason…I deal with storage and manipulation of several hundred thousand files. Maybe the i/o speed problem was a design deficiency within the Buffalo op system