Network Interface Configuration

Simple stuff?! Remember we are doing this with Windows XP. The one thing you need to be sure of when you sell a product like this is to make sure it works quick and easy. Although it's not for everyone I have to say that installation is indeed quick and easy. First thing to do is just to connect the RaidSonic ICY BOX IB-NAS2000 to a network switch and power up the device, which will try to establish a DHCP connection. The Operating System resides on the 8MB flash memory, which will also allow the unit to be configured according to your own needs.

Once the NAS2000 received its own IP address we can actually start the configuration of our network attached storage. The configuration is one the most essential tasks, but is actually easy to do. Via our web browser we connect to the ICY BOX IB-NAS2000 which will ask our admin login and password. Once that is provided it will take you to the initial screen, the control panel. From there we can configure the users and groups, file server and management, system and network settings, and the maintenance of the network drive. After going through the different items we configured our Maxtor 120GB as an ext2 file system accessible via Windows.

RaidSonic build a very user friendly interface and the approach is quite self explaining. Several means are available to use the ICY BOX IB-NAS2000 and we opted to use the Windows approach which will enable us to map the device on our Windows XP machines as a normal network drive. Once everything is configured, we can now access the device from within Windows and start using it.

Test Results & Benchmarks

SiSoftware Sandra Pro 2007 SP1 (10.105)

SiSoftware Sandra (the System Analyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant) is an information & diagnostic utility. It should provide most of the information you need to know about your hardware, software and other devices whether hardware or software. We will be using SiSoftware Sandra to measure the performance of our removable ICY BOX IB-NAS2000 network storage drive.

RaidSonic ICY BOX Ethernet (Maxtor 120GB Ultra ATA/133)

Time to have a look at the performance delivered via the Ethernet connection on the ICY BOX IB-NAS2000 storage. Once again we turned to SiSoftware Sandra which has the ability to check the network bandwidth performance. We fired up the NAS2000, mapped the network drive and started our benchmark run.

What did the box say again? Network date transfer up to 8MB/s... Well yes that right, it is even a bit more according to SiSoftware. Our unit reported 9MB/s as network bandwidth which is just a bit more then advertised. Just as a reference, an optimized 100Mbit network will result in about 10MB/s as bandwidth. The latency is also fine, resulting in 294µs on average. Most similar networks will be around 300-350µs. The lower the latency, the better. So the ICY BOX network attached storage certainly done that, good work RaidSonic!