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SimpleTech SimpleShare


Date
: 08/3/05 – 12:48:01 AM

Author
:

Category
: Storage

Page 1 : Index

Manufacturer
: SimpleTech

Price
: $238 (Or lower depending on your retailer)

Not too long ago we first introduced SimpleTech with their DDR2 PC4200 dual channel kit. While it was stated to be your standard no-frills memory kit, it proved to be much more. It offered users an abundance of potential without the use of any fancy heat spreaders.

SimpleTech focuses in on three types of products: memory, flash, and solid state. Today, we'll be taking a look at SimpleTech's SimpleShare Network Attached Storage.

Unlike many external storage solutions, both packaged with and without a hard drive, the SimpleShare NAS is exactly what the name is; a very simple to use NAS unit that's designed for homes and small businesses. We'll be focusing in on the features of this unit and we'll evaluate its performance through the ease of use and the results obtained by third party networking benchmarks.

Page 2 : Package

The SimpleShare NAS unit arrived in its retail form. The box, sealed in a plastic wrap, is much heavier than one would expect.

The front of the box shows a picture of a white unit laid out on the foreground of a wired network. The top right corner gives you the maximum capacity of this particular unit, there are three sizes to pick from: 160 GB, 250 GB and a monster 400 GB unit.

The backside of the box has a blurb on the selling points, the overall unit and what you can use it for. Also visible is the picture of the back of the unit. When paired with the three-quarters view, you get a good idea of the entire product.

The sides of the box give you a detailed run down on the specifications as well as an 'actual size' picture of the unit.

With not many more things to cover on the box, we'll run down the specs and then explore what's inside.

Page 3 : Specifications

The following information was taken from SimpleTech's website.

There are three models that you can buy. The "low" end model has 160 GB of storage space. It's not exactly small until you see the middle model with 250 GB of space and the top of the line model with a whopping
400 GB
of storage space!

Here are some more comments SimpleTech has to say about their product.

You read correctly, that's expandable to 1 TB of space! This is made possible through the 2 USB ports built directly into the SimpleShare unit. By purchasing an additional 400 GB and 250 GB SimpleDrive (SimpleTech's external hard drive solution), you get over 1 TB of space! :D The only draw back is price, but if you want bragging rights, its right here for 1143 dollars. Anyways, we're deviating from the subject, so lets get back on topic by running down all that you get with this package.

Page 4 : Package Contents

The SimpleShare unit was packaged with a number of little things.

On the left side are the various cables, AC Adapter, standard power cord and Cat 5 cable. On the right side are various guides, a NASFinder CD with a complete manual on the CD, SimpleTech products promotional pamphlet and a Quick Installation Guide.

I was disappointed to see that the actual unit was not protected in any sort of bag. Instead, the unit and the feet stands were wedged into a foam brick so that it doesn't bounce around in the box.

This doesn't prevent the things inside the box from moving as they please. As you can see in the above photo there's not much more we can do to repair that scratch. Perhaps SimpleTech should consider placing an bag around the unit. Luckily for us, it's only a minor scratch and it won't be affecting the performance of the system.

Page 5 : Setup

There isn't all that much to do in terms of setting up the SimpleShare unit. You simply pull it out of the box and slide in the feet so it stands upright. If that's too much for you, you could always just leave it on the side.

A close look at the front doesn't really show much, but when we power up the unit, we'll see a bit more information conveyed through the opaque plastic.

The back side of the unit has all of the user controlled components.

At the top of the unit is a trigger that you can press to put the unit on stand-by. A second push will reactivate the unit. Directly below the trigger is a pin sized hole you can push to reset the device to the factory settings. Below that are the two USB ports, either for external hard drives or for your printer. The 10/100 Mbps Cat5 jack is situated about two thirds of the way down from the top. The last and probably one of the most important connectors is the 12V DC plug; it's found at the very bottom of the drive.

The bare minimum components required to setup the SimpleShare NAS unit is a live AC outlet for power and an active Cat5 jack that you can plug the unit into. A short Cat5 cable is provided for you if you want to place the unit close to your router.

Once you have both DC plug and network cable connected to the SimpleShare unit, wait for the "Ready" LED to power up before looking for the drive.

If you have a MAC filter, which I do, you will have to disable it so you can find the SimpleShare NAS. Assuming that you don't have a MAC filter, you need to fire up Internet Explorer and type in "\SimpleShare" in the Address box.

Once you've made it to the SimpleShare unit, you will be prompted for a login and password. The default is
clearly
printed on the popup window. :)

Logging into the device will let you change the configuration through a Basic or Advanced profile.

The advanced configuration:

If you change any of the settings, it will be confirmed to you.

The basic configuration runs through the same settings, but it does so one step at a time.

Once you've completed the configuration, you'll be taken to the full administration page which has a lot more features for you to change.

Over the next four pages, we'll take a concise look at each of these options.

Page 6 : NAS Admin

The first section up on our list is the administration page. The first of six pages in this section includes the basic configuration.

There aren't very many options here, but one you want to pay particular attention to is the administration username and password. Leaving this on the default setting is not recommended!

The next page is the Firmware section. When I received the SimpleShare unit, I had firmware 1.0.2.

You can download the latest firmware from the SimpleTech website; a link is provided to you on the installation CD. Downloading the firmware and selecting the path, we can run the update to get the latest firmware.

Give yourself a couple of minutes, a restart of the system and you'll be running on 1.0.4 (latest at the time of this review).

The third page on the list is error alerts and logging.

You may find this useful if you think someone without authorized access is trying to log in.

Entering the home stretch of this section, we can modify some of the setup specific to Window O/Ses.

The next page is if you've selected the option on page four (Windows Setup). Without enabling
User Based Share Access
, you can't create users.

The final page on this section is simply running through the first admin page step by step.

In the step by step process, more information about each step if given to the user.

Now that we're done with this page we'll take a look at the Share Management options.

Page 7 : NAS Share Management

Our Share Management page isn't nearly as long as the Administration page, but it's very important to properly configure the device to ensure access is granted and restricted depending on your users.

This first page allows you to create your different shares. A share is basically a folder located on the drive, the default
NetFolder
is a share. Adding/creating a new share is very simple. Hit the button, fill out the text box and confirm.

Each share can be further configured by assigning it to a different pool, controlled in the Disk Management section, or by adding a password to restrict access.

The entire process of creating shares and authentication is well documented in the help section.

Page 8 : NAS Disk Config

The disk configuration is the longest section of all the administration pages. There's a phenomenal amount of information and options for you to change. We'll start this off with the very basic.

This page gives you a good overview of the system – free space, used space, etc. You can even get a report on the type of drive used (Western Digital Caviar 7200 RPM 2 MB Cache for the 160 GB models) and obtain a full health detail write up on the status of the drive. This full detail drive gives you the low down on what SMART reports. You can also conduct a
short
and
long Test
. The short test takes approximately 2 minutes and the long test takes 62 minutes; the results of theses tests are fairly detailed and would help in troubleshooting the SimpleShare.

Now that we know that the drive is operating, we can proceed to the next section. This section is the management page of Foreign Disks which are USB external drives connected to the SimpleShare. Without an external drive, we can't do much here.

If you decide to split up the drive into different partitions, you need to delete the existing pool from the first page and create new ones on the
Create
page.

The first thing I noticed was the ability to create mirrored and striped drives. Can anyone say RAID? :D

The page after this one allows you to resize the pools – a quick way to free up space so you can create new pools and activate your mirroring and striping abilities.

If you decide to take the Mirror route, you can create a spare. These spare drives kick-in if one of the partitions (drives) fail on you, not that you'd ever want that to happen. If you have the 400 GB model, this idea is pretty reasonable since you have all that space.

If you don't want to mirror your spare drives any longer, the next page helps you remove them.

The final section controls the power management feature of the SimpleShare unit.

This is a great feature that will help extend the life of the SimpleShare unit. I think another nifty feature would be a programmed spin down at a specific time. If you run your own business, there's a good chance you won't be doing much in the wee hours of the morning. Instead of having to manually put the drive on stand-by, it could be done automatically.

We're going to exit this section and move onto the LAN configuration.

Page 9 : NAS LAN

There aren't very many options for the LAN settings.

Considering you bought yourself a Network Attached Storage device, I can assume you have the basic knowledge of what a LAN is and how to configure it. This makes this page pretty boring, so we'll skip the details!

Page 10 : NAS Printer & Help

The last two sections are the NAS Printer and the Help section. If you don't already have a networked printer, this makes the setup of one really easy.

If you plug in a printer into the USB port it will appear in the Printer section.

By hitting the
Apply
button, your printer will be added to the service.

Simply browse for a network printer and provide your own drivers for the installation.

I selected the printer pool to be the
SimplePool
; you have the option of choosing between that or
None
.

I tested out the networked printer and it worked flawlessly. By the time I walked to the printer, the job was already done. There appears to be no significant delay in having the jobs pass through the SimpleShare unit.

The last section before we check out the performance is the
help
menu. The help menus are very detailed and should be referred to! There aren't very many pictures in the help file, but the text included does a great job of explaining things.

Page 11 : Performance

With everything configured, the first thing I decided to do was run the Map Network Drive wizard. I pointed to the NetFolder directory on the SimpleShare and within minutes I had my Z drive for networking purposes.

In order to test out the SimpleShare unit, we need to know a few things. Let's start with my test system and home network:

The NAS unit and my machine were connected through a 100 Mbps SMC7004VWBR Router (10/100 LAN w/ 802.11b Wireless). The testing of the unit was done with two pieces of software. The first piece of software, Sisoft Sandra's FileSystem Benchmark, gives us some various read and write performances. To make things really worth while, for the second piece of software we're going to introduce IoZone's Filesystem Benchmark. IoZone is designed to do a number of things to test out the performance of a filesystem, and in our benchmarks we'll be getting the transfer read and write rates of the SimpleShare. IoZone will first write 64 KB of data onto the SimpleShare drive in 4KB files. It'll then double the recording sizes from 4 KB up to a maximum of 16 MB. At the same time, it progressively increases the file sizes from 64 KB up to 1 GB! In short, a lot of file transfers to give you an idea of what to expect in terms of performance.

If you want to reproduce the results I got, here is the command I used:

Here we are asking IoZone to perform an automated test that generates a test1.txt text file that is a binary spreadsheet. You can open this file in Excel and just generate the graphs you need. The -i 0 and -i 1 tells the system to perform both read/re-read and write/re-write tests. We set the maximum file size to be 1 GB with the -g 1G command. Last but not least, -f \SimpleshareNetFolder est est tells IoZone where my drive is and what folder to produce the test files in with what name.

Now that we know what is going on, let's see some results.

Starting with Sisoft Sandra, we obtained the following results:

These numbers give us a general understanding of what to expect when we use the SimpleShare unit. However, it's not very detailed. To elaborate on the performance, we use IoZone.

To start things off, we need to write files before we can read them. So we'll do the same with the results.

When IoZone first produces the results, you'll have transfer rates ranging from 4,000 KB/s to 400 MB/s. Anyone who knows a thing or two about networking knows that the maximum transfer rate on a 100 Mbps router is 12.5 MB/s. The explanation for anything over that is merely file caching effects and should be ignored. Keeping that in mind, we see that our typical write speed is
4500-5000
KB/s. A respectable number.

Taking a look at our read results:

The average read performance is
5500
KB/s. However, we do peak up to 8000 KB/s.
These are very respectable numbers. For a 1 GB file, it'll take just over 3 minutes to pull it off the network or 3.5 minutes to write it up there.

Now, when it comes to temperatures, the SimpleTech SimpleShare NAS is completely passively cooled. The outer shell's 1/8th" aluminum casting takes all the heat away from the hard drive. After several hours of operation, the case does become fairly warm.

Page 12 : Inside the Box

SimpleTech doesn't make it very hard for you to open up the unit and tamper with it. There's no sticker claiming any warranty will be voided if the seal is broken. For me, that's just an invitation to open it up and take a little peek. Doing this is
very
easy. Find yourself a Philips screw driver and remove the four screws holding everything together. Once that is done, the cover just falls right off.

You can really see how compact things are. The entire unit is maybe an inch bigger than the hard drive casing.

A few more screws and we get to the hard drive.

Just like the system reported, a Western Digital Caviar.

Six screws later and the PCB can be taken out. A number of very interesting things can be seen here, like a battery and some memory ICs to keep all your settings in place.

These two Hynix modules give us a total of 32 MB (2*16) and operate at 266-2.5-3-3.

The heart and soul of this machine is the
Broadcom NAS On-a-Chip
solution. This little piece of silicon (BCM4780PKPM) alone cost less than 20 dollars if you buy a million. :)

Here's a quote I would like to pull up from BroadCom:

While there are a number of nice features, I'm already hoping to see a 1000 Mbps option in future SimpleShare units. Many motherboards are already offering 1000 Mbps NICs, so it shouldn't be much of a stretch for Broadcom.

Two other important features is the ALi M5273 chip which controls the two USB 2.0 ports and the ACard ATP-865 which is the ATA133 controller.

The ACard controller supports ATA133 drives and it would certainly be nice if SimpleTech took advantage of this by using an ATA 133 drive.

We'll wrap things up on the next page.

Page 13 : Conclusion

Whether you own a small business or just someone who likes to archive everything, the SimpleShare NAS gives you a large amount of space with very little hassle. You can have a basic configuration, that works at an optimal performance, up and running in less than 5 minutes. Additional configuration changes can take the performance to the next level.

While some of small changes would improve the overall performance, the largest concern for SimpleTech would be to reduce the overall price so every home owner and enthusiast could drop the greenbacks to pick one up.

Advantages

Easy to use
Expandable
Fanless

Disadvantage

Passive cooling gets fairly warm during operation
Not exactly something everyone can afford

Overclockers Online would like to thank SimpleTech for providing a sample to review.