March 24, 2009, 4:44 PM — Seagate on Tuesday introduced its BlackArmor NAS 440 and 420, two Network Attached Storage (NAS) appliances aimed at the small business market. They’re priced starting at $800.
The BlackArmor NAS systems are aimed at small office environments with up to 50 employees, as well as self-employed professionals who are looking for network-attached storage systems. They come with management utility software and backup software.
Each system is a four-bay NAS device populated with Seagate-built hard disk drives. The BlackArmor NAS 420 comes with two drives in the four-drive chassis; the BlackArmor NAS 440 comes fully populated with four drive mechanisms. Capacities range from 2 terabytes (TB) to 8TB. The drive bays are hot-swappable and user-serviceable. Four USB ports allow you to attach external USB hard drives for storage rotation. The power supply is external and the fan is user-serviceable.
Features shared between the systems include an on-board LCD screen that displays settings and status information including event alerts. The drives can be configured as a RAID array, and you can encrypt volumes and apply password protection. The BlackArmor NAS systems also let you access files from the Internet using a Web browser without requiring any additional software to be installed, via Seagate Global Access service.
System requirements call for Mac OS X 10.4.11 or later (or Windows XP or Vista).
The two-drive 2TB configuration costs $800, four-drive configuration costs $1,200 for 4TB, $1,700 for a 6TB system and $2,000 for an 8TB system.
