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Plextor PX-EH25L NAS


Date
: 06/21/06 – 02:11:36 PM

Author
:

Category
: Storage

Page 1 : Index

Manufacturer:
Plextor

Price:
$299.00 CDN MSRP

What do you think of when you hear the name Plextor? Optical drive solutions from CD-ROM to DVD-RW drives, at least that's what you should think of if you have been involved in computers over the last decade and a bit. Of course you may just be familiar with offset printing and Plextor might be a name you have heard alongside Sanden and Aquaflex as Plextor is much more than just an optical drive manufacturer. To us computer connoisseurs, however, Plextor will always be associated with optical storage.

Like every other company in the computer hardware industry, in order to succeed you have to grow and adjust. Adjusting to the market has spurred growth in many companies like Plextor that found themselves in a potentially declining market over the last few years with optical drives hitting a wall and advancement not looking good. Prices of hard drives have dropped to an all time low with home networks popping up everywhere. Clearly there are other options for data storage solutions than writable media.

In steps the PX-EH25L, dubbed a "Professional Network Attached Storage" device. It certainly commands attention and looks the role of a professional solution, but can it deliver where it counts? That is what I am here to find out. We will look at the construction, setup, installation, and configuration of the PX-EH25L. This 250GB NAS (Network Attached Storage) connects via an onboard 10/100 connection and also supports USB attached drives, FTP server function, and print server support. Obviously the PX-EH25L is nothing short of a toolbox with all kinds of uses so we have plenty to look at, starting with the retail package.

Page 2 : Package

I was not expecting the Plextor PX-EH25L to be a large package because it was just a NAS device for a 3.5" hard drive. I mean, how big could it be?

It's about that big. Not really huge, not really small but pretty much what I had anticipated. The package is nice and big which indicates a safe environment for the actual drive and enclosure inside. This also gives Plextor plenty of room for information about the product. The front provides us with a large photo of the PX-EH25L and a small list of features at the top of which is the claim of 94.5 Mbps.

No space is wasted with the sides playing a role in providing a diagram outlining exactly what contents should be inside the box which looks to be the drive, an ethernet cable, AC adapter and power cord, CD, and manual. That is about all we would need to get up and running so that should be it.

The opposite end is a little more serious, providing a specifications sheet in both French and English. For those non-Canadian readers, it is commonplace for French and English labels on things. We will go over the specifications later but it's obvious that the PX-EH25L runs a 7200RPM hard drive and fully intends on filling the 100Mbps bandwidth we are offered by the network.

The top of the package gets in on the act as well flowing with its continuation of the elliptical lines that decorate the other sides of the box. The top also comes complete with its own list of details in French and English.

The back of the package is a large canvas and broken up nicely with plenty of text alongside clear, labeled diagrams. What fun, let's get closer.

The bilingual theme continues with the list of features here being doubled much like everywhere else. Plextor just mentions the basic features of the PX-EH25L.

In the opposite corner, a nice diagram outlines how the PX-EH25L integrates in a network and what devices can connect to it. The ability to connect an external hard drive via USB and backup data from the PX-EH25L is very nice and the printer server will be the first thing I look at post installation.

One thing I like is a diagram of the connections on a device. If I know what connects to it, then I can figure out how it may or may not work. Despite its vast array of capabilities there are only a few connections. At the top is the power switch followed by the power input and the two USB ports half way down. The RJ-45 connection that gets it connected to our network is on the bottom. It is now time to look at some specifications a little closer up.

Page 3 : Specifications

The Plextor EX-PH25L is chock full of features despite its small stature. My personal goal with the PX-EH25L is to remove the requirement for one whole system which effectively is a server, and replace it with a much smaller, quieter, workstation-like machine. The built-in print server is what will seal the deal for me as I will now be able to turn off all of my machines and still print on the network. Let's start the specifications section with a look at how Plextor views a NAS:

I cut it off there as I think the main idea behind this device is outlined there if you were not fully aware just yet. Here are the specifications on the Lan connection:

The hard drive details:

The Plextor PX-EH25L also sports two USB 2.0 (Hi-Speed/Full-Speed/Low-Speed) ports which can be used to plug external USB backup drives into or printers for the built-in print server support.

The above list of operating systems is blatantly void of any Linux or Mac builds while supporting the full Windows lineup dating back to Windows NT/4.0. I assumed that at some level the software driving this unit would be Linux-based and found this list of supported operating systems quite odd. I will only be using Windows today so I won't be able to test for any other OS functionality.

Page 4 : Package Contents

I knew there was a reason that the package required to be so large. This enclosure is definitely going to arrive safely at its destination.

The drive is suspended in solid styrofoam with plenty of room all around the unit. The cables and accessories have a package at the front that prevents them from tumbling around inside during transport. I honestly don't see how the PX-EH25L could get damaged during shipping unless it was completely crushed.

As the outside of the box stated, the PX-EH25L comes complete with AC adapter and cord as well as the software, an RJ-45 cable, and the manual. There is, of course, also warranty and registration info enclosed.

The ethernet cable caught my attention as it is a flat black one and not the typical bright blue or yellow round RJ-45 cable that comes with most any other networking device. This cable is sophisticated and elegant if an ethernet cable can be. This very much matches the looks and feel of the PX-EH25L.

The last piece out of the package is the external drive unit itself. As we saw, it comes encrusted in styrofoam protection and a wonderful blue bag, no doubt possessing anti-static capabilities. This, in my opinion, is the only way to ship a device of this nature. Well done Plextor for what I would consider a nicely designed and very protective package.

With the bag removed, the PX-EH25L emerges as quite the stunning and elegant piece of hardware. It is just big enough to command attention but not too big that it simply draws it. The weight of the unit is as you would expect from a hard drive and proportioned as such.

These vent holes allow air to escape from the enclosure inside. They not only serve a purpose but certainly add to the stunning looks of the enclosure giving your eye something to follow as it stretches the length of the drive when you first see it. Later on in this section we will look at the internals of the enclosure and see how it works.

The base has precise and integrated foot pads that act as a stand and keep the drive in the upright position. I believe I saw somewhere that the drive needs to remain in an upright position. I will look into that for setup.

Taking a photo of this unit from any angle produced a nice photo. The clean lines of the PX-EH25L and smooth integration of aluminum and dark gray plastic will make this drive look great on anyone's desk.

Underneath the drive is a sticker with FCC Standards certification as well as the serial number. We can also see plain as day that this unit is a Revision 02. I then went digging for some information about a revision one PX-EH25L but came up empty.

As we turn to look at the rear connection panel we see that the PX-EH25L doesn't have anything spectacular about its shape or design but it just looks great and feels like a real professional device.

At the top, the rear panel begins with the on/off switch with the power connection from the AC adapter just below. In the middle of the panel are the two USB 2.0 connections and at the bottom is the RJ-45 connection to plug the PX-EH25L into the network. Next on the plate is to see what is inside, can I do it without damaging the beautiful exterior?

The first step is to pop off the top and bottom rails. These are a bit tricky and I needed a long flat-head to release a couple of plastic clips holding the center down. There is definitely potential for broken plastic clips in this process so I would not recommend it unless necessary, which is never.

With the side panels off and another plate removed, we have access to the internals and what type of drive we have inside. A commonplace OEM Hitachi Deskstar is located inside. I am not sure whether this is good news or bad news as I do not have any personal experience with Hitachi 3.5" drives. I assume it would be quiet or Plextor wouldn't have chosen it.

The backside of the control board inside is speckled with ICs from NEC, ACard, Realtek, and ST, including a couple of memory ICs from Hynix. The functions of the PX-EH25L make it more than just a storage device, like I said in the opening, I hope the PX-EH25L completely removes one of my computers so all of this hardware is completely necessary. I will now put everything back together and get on with the physical setup of the Plextor PX-EH25L.

Page 5 : Setup

The physical setup with the PX-EH25L is nothing more than plugging in the power cable and the ethernet connection into your network. The hard drive is mounted inside and ready for action the moment it leaps from the box.

Having said that, I decided to setup the PX-EH25L right on my desk for the testing period. This will give me a good chance to keep an ear on its audible manners, plus the PX-EH25L is pretty and shiny so women will be attracted to me!

With the PX-EH25L comes a quick-start guide that is what most people will want to use to configure their PX-EH25Ls when using a router setup with a DHCP server. Oh yes, I made the assumption that we already knew that a NAS device needed a network in which case your standard 4-port router will do the trick. The first page in the quick start guide is dedicated to physically setting up the router. The quick start guide then goes over the proper power off sequence. After all, this is a hard drive and needs some extra care in that area.

The next obvious step once we have the PX-EH25L physically setup is to get it configured with our network. If using a DHCP network then all that is required to make the drive available on the network is to search for it. This is explained in an easy step by step process in the guide for those unfamiliar with such an activity. The setup guide then goes on to discuss the on-line manual provided on the included CD as well as proper shutdown procedures.

I followed the search steps in the step above and quickly found myself with access to another drive on my network named Px-eh. It was as simple and easy as it should be. Now it is time to configure this little monster to be so much more than a drive on a network. To do that, I will have to put the CD in the drive and dig through the HTML manual to find that information. A nice addition from Plextor would be to post the manual on-line since it is only HTML. That way updates are live and if you are running a network of any sort, you are likely on-line so most all customers of this product will be able to access the on-line manual.

Page 6 : Configuration – Profile Menu

Now that I know the drive is on my network I know I can log into the PX-EH25L. Having just turned on the DHCP server on my router, and the first IP address I have it set to assign is 192.168.1.100, it is safe to assume that the PX-EH25L has that IP address and if the above image was the giveaway, have a look and you can see I was right. To get here you will simply need to find out what IP address your router has assigned the NAS.

This initial page lets us choose either the Administration section or the User section. The User section is nothing more than the Profile Menu, which is identical to the admin section, and the ability to change the user's password. This section will show just that, the Profile Menu but from the Administration section. We enter the user:pass advised by the manual to be admin:

I will be providing you screenshots of all sections that contain any settings. These will be broken down into this, the Profile Menu, followed by the short Easy Mode section and the large Expert Mode section. This means plenty of screenshots so just keep scrolling. The first screen is the
System Profile
.

Network Info

HDD Info

Not only is information provided on the internal hard drive but also the external hard drives connected via USB.

USB Info

Page 7 : Configuration – Easy Mode

It is short and sweet but that is what the goal is. Plextor wants a quick and easy section to get the Plextor PX-EH25L setup and working on your network. The first section is self explanatory.

Time Adjust

Basic Setup

Basic setup is the easiest way to get the PX-EH25L on a network without an active DCHP or in my case, to turn it off now that I can configure the PX-EH25L to work without one. Setting the name that shows up on the network and workgroup is here as well. Setup couldn't be easier from here and at this point the drive will show up on you networks as a usable storage space. If, however, you want to fully utilize the PX-EH25L then you will need to go through the next section and configure some things in the Expert Mode.

Page 8 : Configuration – Expert Mode

We start off the Expert Mode with the network settings for a MS network.

MS Network Setup

TCP/IP Settings

Service Setup

FTP Server

Time Server
– simply connects to a remote time server.

Print Server
– setup for a print server, it just offers the option to turn the print server on or off and the buffer for the printer.

Avel LinkServer setup

User Account

Adding user accounts for FTP access or folder access is as simple as filling in the blanks.

Group Account

Sharing

Backup

The backup section is quite important as it offers built in back up support for the NAS drive. This is a nice feature for those ultra careful with their data or someone who needs ultimate protection.

Backup Setup

This is the most important screen of the Backup section as it goes over the entire list of options for this process. There seems to be quite a nice set of options that we have with the backup. Any needs should be met for most users.

Check Disk

Format
– This section just allows us to format the drive.

Delete Disk
– Like above, the heading is self explanatory.

FAT Disk Setup

Wake On LAN
– Turns on or off the wake on LAN ability of the PX-EH25L.

Power Saving Mode

The last three sections do just what they describe. I found the interface to be self explanatory for the most part but didn't particularly enjoy the interface. It is efficient but pretty boring and dated. Setting up the drive couldn't have been any easier, it really was just a matter of going through the selections and hitting OK. Within 5 minutes I could access the "disc" drive on my network and my printer was printing over the network from any computer.

It is now time to do some heavy transferring of data and run some benchmarks on this NAS drive, the Plextor PX-EH25L. It has been impressive to say the least to setup, how will it perform?

Page 9 : Performance & Testing

We'll get the number crunching over with first and then I will talk about the other features that the PX-EH25L offers. For testing the speed of the PX-EH25L I utilized this wonderful program called IOZone. It runs the hard drive through an array of data reading and writing tests releasing the results to a binary file that MS Excel can graph into visually usable data. For clarity I will list the hardware used and the network setup that was involved in testing:

My network is as follows:
The
Plextor PX-EH25L
is plugged into port #1 on my
Linksys WRT54G
4-port wireless router with a 10ft length of Cat5e cable. Port #2 of the router is connected to a D-Link DSS-8+ 10/100 8-port switch with a 30ft length of Cat5e cable. The
nForce 4 Network Controller
is connected to this D-Link switch on another 10ft length of Cat5e cable. There were no other machines using the network during the testing and each tests conditions will be explained after the results. We will start with a look at the Sisoft Sandra results followed by IOZone.

SiSoft Sandra 07 Lite

The SiSoft Sandra numbers that have come out are very good showing a range of 6600KB/s to 8100KB/s which is 55Mbps to 63Mbps. With a theoretical limit of 100Mpbs on any 10/100 network averaging around 60Mbps is well above satisfactory. I think that is a great result and am interested to see if IOZone finds similar results with a much wider array of read/write file sizes.

To run IOZone we need to start it from the command line. Simon summed it up best in one of his reviews when describing IOZone:

We can also choose exactly what size of files we wanted it to write or what type of reading/writing is to be done. There are many options to be chosen when running IOZone and so you can duplicate this test at home, I will provide you with the command used for testing the Plextor PX-EH25L:

Essentially our command is set to run IOZone and produce an Excel file of the results. The command to run on auto both the read/re-read and write/re-write tests with a maximum file size of up to 1GB is also tucked in there. The last command is obviously letting IOZone know which drive to benchmark and where it is.

IOZone Read

I shrunk the results down to show just the data that was within that 100Mbps limit of the network and that data shows that the Read speed is just under the 8000KB/s which is right at the Sandra results. What is also very noticeable is that the results are quite consistent without a lot of variation among similar file sizes.

IOZone Write

Very similar results are to be had on the IOZone writing benchmark showing an average of the useable data at that 7000-8000KB/s range. It is safe to say either my network is limited to around that speed or that is just how well the Plextor Px-EH25L operates on this network I have setup. This is welcomed information in my opinion as I think that is excellent performance. We will now look at the extra features of the PX-EH25L, mainly the FTP performance.

I setup an FTP account with my name then forwarded port 21 on my router to the IP of the PX-EH25L. First attempt to connect and voila, I am now connected to the Plextor PX-EH25L through the internet at another location. Total configuration time was about 3 minutes give or take a minute or two. I didn't use anything fancy for testing FTP performance, just the windows time piece. I transferred 5GBs of music and photos and timed the transfer. I also recorded the highest and average transfer speed based on the network data chart on the machine. The read and write results were identical so I have included only one set of data:

This is a screenshot of me uploading to the Plextor PX-EH25L. I had to take it to work to test the FTP capabilities over the internet because within the network I would get about 2000KB/s. As you can see my entire 768Kbps upload bandwidth is filled which means the PX-EH25L has no problem handling internet traffic. I would hope not seeing as the read/write speeds over the network were around 60Mbps. I was not able to reach the claimed 94.5Mbps at any given time but that could have been a result of my network and not the Plextor PX-EH25L, but the 60Mbps I averaged is more than acceptable for basic 10/100 home components.

Acoustically the PX-EH25L never bothered me when it was sitting up on my desk. You could hear the hard drive spin up and down when it would power up or down from sleep, but not some much as a whir when the drive was reading and writing data. With the drive behind me about 5 feet on the floor, forget about it. It was like it wasn't there. The printer was connected to it and not once did I need to restart the printer or the PX-EH25L. They just stayed connected to the network and on. If the network was up, they worked, 100% of the time.

Page 10 : Conclusion

We have come to the end and I ask myself, did the Plextor PX-EH25L live up to the expectations I had for it? It absolutely did in every outlined function. Does the Plextor PX-EH25L look stunning in an office, on a shelf or a desk? The answer once again is a resounding absolutely. The exterior of the PX-EH25L is the cleanest of all network storage devices I have seen. It can stand out as the main piece sitting on a shelf or can fade away into the background and just work without making much of a peep.

The PX-EH25L does not get away without some negatives. The configuration screen is functional and does its job but it could be about a 100 times better with an afternoon's worth of work and a basic web designer. That said, I was able to get everything setup exactly how I wanted within minutes. A little more control over the way FTP users are allowed on the PX-EH25L would be nice but that is about all I can't claim praise about.

I think NAS devices will be showing even more of a presence through the rest of 2006 but so far this Plextor is one of the nicer looking and better performing ones I have used. For 2 months almost, this PX-EH25L has been acting as a file server on my network and not once has it ever let me down with either poor performance or a technical issue.

Advantages:

Stunning looks
Extremely quiet
Solid performance
Very, very reliable

Disadvantages:

A little larger than some NAS devices
FTP user control could be better
Interface is more for tech savvy

Overclockers Online would like to thank Plextor for providing this sample for review.