Nexsan SATABeast review

To configure the SATABeast you have a couple of options. You can use a serial cable to connect directly to the primary controller board, create an IP route or configure a laptop to the same IP address range as the default. You only need to configure the first IP port and then you can restart and do everything else through the browser.

The menu system for the SATABeast is just a beefed up version of the standard Nexsan menu. This is sensible as it means you don't have to know different layouts or working practices when working with different storage devices. When you connect through the browser, by default there is no authentication. You will want to change this before doing anything else.

First, set up all of the communication ports - both Fibre and iSCSI. This allows you to then decide how you are going to provide access to the volumes and storage arrays. While you are doing this the SATABeast will be running the default QuickStart configuration. This creates four separate arrays, two hot spare drives and eight storage volumes. If you don't want this you must go through the process of deleting the volumes, then the arrays and put the hot spares back into the general storage pool.

You can create a new QuickStart configuration or simply delete everything and build your own. As soon as you create an array it is assigned as a single volume. To stop this, you need to quickly delete the default volume and define what you want. Creation of an array is very simple. From the browser GUI you select the drives you want in the array, give it a name, choose between RAID 0,1,4,5 or 6, set the stripe size and allocate it to a storage controller.

As soon as this is done, the array and default volume are created. One step that you might want to do before this is set the rebuild priority. Selecting the highest setting when first building an array will save considerable time. We created two arrays, each of 13 drives to test the time it takes to do an initialisation. The first was RAID 5 and the second RAID 6. There was just a few seconds between each. Using High priority, it took eight hours and 48 minutes and was clearly an overnight build.

One of the most important decisions, therefore, is how many arrays and how many volumes you want to create. You allocate the Array to a storage controller which is very useful. You might want to create three arrays, one of which must have maximum bandwidth. You would allocate this to its own controller and have the other two share another controller. As the SATABeast will support two controller boards, there is ample opportunity to spread the load across the controllers. If you are using redundant arrays, you can dedicate a controller board to handle the data redundancy between units.

Working with the SATABeast was remarkably easy with the exception of the noise. It was quite easily the noisiest device we have had under test but given the amount of air needed to cool 42 drives, this is understandable. The menu is clearly laid out with just a small number of heading and everything else in a tabbed structure.

Deleting volumes and arrays is easy but not something you can do without knowing it. The screen turns bright red and you have to select a check box and then click a button to make this happen. Along with the rest of the UI, this gave a feeling of security.

There is an excellent graphical dashboard backed up by the lights on the front of the unit and the performance was blindingly fast. These are the same controller boards as used in the SATABoy so no surprises that they performed as well. With both Fibre Channel ports connected we got around 330MB/s which is a little below what Nexsan claims is possible but comfortably fast.