Nexsan SATABoy

While the SATABoy is a rack mount device, heat and noise are still a consideration. Even when running complete rebuilds, the SATABoy did not generate a huge amount of heat and was less noisy than other arrays under test.

As the size of hard disks has increased, so has the size of the arrays that can be created and managed. This means that the rebuild time on a large array can be quite extensive. We created a single large RAID 5 array with a single volume and populated it with a mix of data and multimedia files. Having accessed and altered files randomly for several days, we then pulled one of the disks at random and inserted the spare disk shipped by Nexsan.

We were interested in how long it would take to rebuild such a large array. The answer was just over 6 hours despite the array not being in use during that time. If this had occurred during the working day then it would have had an impact on all users with the added risk of data running with no redundancy. As drives get larger, this time will only get worse. Of course, not everyone will create such a huge array but array management is something that is still not well understood by many administrators.

Overall data performance was good and when we connected both fibre ports we were able to get close to the 370MB/sec that Nexsan claims.

Nexsan have carefully positioned themselves against players such as Equallogic, EMC, IBM and Hitachi Data Systems. Despite this, the price of the SATABoy is more than 50 per cent cheaper than the competition. Normally such a price difference would indicate a lack of engineering but that isn't the case here.

This is an aggressively priced solution that should open up access to the SAN market for small and mid-size businesses and those who want to put a remote box into a branch office.