Promise’s updates to the NS4600 are very effective across the board.
Visually, the revised case design is better looking than that of the older NS4300N. Promise continues to use plastic as its material of choice, but it doesn't feel cheap, and overall build quality remains good. Even still, we found ourselves thinking that a metal case would have been more appropriate, improving the overall impression even further.
More Convenience
The addition of an eSATA port offers additional value. The same goes for the integration of download, media, and iTunes servers right out of the box. Users are no longer forced to go hunting around the Web to find compatible plug-ins, and then install them manually. Thanks to its integrated DLNA support, as well as the media and iTunes server, the NS4600 comes well-equipped for multimedia duties on the home network.
Easy Backups
Small and mid-sized companies won’t care about the multimedia functionality as much. Instead, this group will focus on the device’s NAS replication capabilities, able to copy files to other NAS devices in the background. The snapshot backup feature will also be appreciated for providing several copies of current files as a sort of extended “undelete” feature.
More Performance
Great data transfer rates with lots of small files, such as Word documents or photographs, suit NS4600 well for use in business environments. It is also quite speedy when backing up or restoring files over a network.
All of this is made possible by the NS4600’s fresh architecture. The EP80579, code named Tolapai, represents Intel’s first embedded processor since 1994. Developed specifically for use in telecommunication infrastructure, this processor also provides sufficient performance for NAS devices. With it, Promise’s N4600 operates in the same league as the Thecus N4100 Pro based on an AMD Geode processor.
It will be interesting to see whether other NAS vendors follow Promise’s lead and offer products built around Intel’s EP80579 rather than processors by Freescale, Marvell, and AMD.

TH people, please do some tests in iSCSI mode =)
Can you please be more specific in your configuration setup?
Can you please be more specific in your configuration setup?
what's the price of this file server?
Would it make more sense to buy an atom Dual core system as file server? Since 25MB/s transfer rates are nothing to boast about!
At least the Atom processor may not be as low in power requirement, but runs Linux AND Windows, can playback 720p video, and get data transfer speeds far higher than the ones mentioned in the benchmark, probably in the likes of 150MB/s(as a wild guess), or perhaps even higher...
For $300, one could basically get a singlecore Atom 270 + 2GB of RAM, and load the files into RAM for faster upload speeds, probably close to the maximum possible through a gigabit lan connection;
(or am I understanding incorrectly why this NS4600 was made?
Depending on the filesystem employed and the client accessing the files, NAS devices show varying results. An iSCSI setup would be much more level, compared to higher level FS/NFS performance tests.
you do realize that most laptops cannot do 4 disk raid 5 right?
Were the hard drives in the 4100 and the 4300 the same? Why no iSCSI? Can the eSATA port be used to automatically back up the whole array to another disk (say having a pair and keeping one off site in case of a fire or other catastrophic event, obviously swapping ofsite adn local disks periodically).
How does this system compare to some some of the home brew RAID boxes that THG has set up, both in price and preformance?
TOO MANY UNANSWERED YET OBVIOUS QUESTIONS!!! Tom's used to be soo much better than this! What is going on over there? Where have all your good writers/reviewers gone (or are you being told to dumb things down by BOM)?
Yep, you can run the game from the drive!
Yeah, I wanted a dedicated NAS type file server, because at the time my gaming computer served that purpose and ran all the time. So I went to craigslist and went out and got a $10 Pentium 3 computer, slapped a PCI SATA card in it and added a 1 TB drive and was good to go.
First thank you for your valuable feedback. Please let me answer a few questions.
Test setup: To lower the impact on transfer rates we are always using the same computer and harddrives for our NAS device tests. You can have a look at the hardware details on page three of this review. There is only one exception: If the NAS device comes preconfigured with harddrives we are using these instead of our Samsung HD321KJ drives.
Slow network performance between Samba and Vista: There has been an issue on both sides, Samba and Vista that led to extremely slow transferrates (around 5MBit/s) when copying files from the NAS device to the Vista machine. According to my present knowledge these issues have been addressed with Service Pack 1 for Vista and the release of Samba 3.0.28a.
So the network configuration used is the standard Vista network configuration as you can find it after a fresh install of the OS. The reason why we do this is that we believe that the average user shouldn't have to fiddle with the network configuration to get satisfying transferrates. A customer expects that the device is running hassle-free out of the box. If it isn't working we think that the manufacturer has to come up with a solution and not the customer.
Jumbo packtes: Some NAS devices support jumbo packets, some don't. As we want to have comparable results we have to go without jumbo packets. Moreover there is no official standard for jumbo packets so it can have a negative impact on data transferrates in certain network setups. But you are right, we shoud have mentioned this in the review.
Stripe size: Almost all NAS devices intended to be used in a SOHO or home network don't allow a selection of the stripe size when setting up the RAID configuration for reasons of simplification. This is also true for the NS4600 and could have been mentioned in the review.
iSCSI tests: The reason why we haven't tested the NS4600 as an iSCSI target is plain simple: It doesn't support this feature.
Greetings from Germany,
Marcel