On the one hand Promise is showing a few new products at CeBIT. On the other, it is also trying to educate its audience. The company claims even large retailers don’t know enough about the possibilities of SAS (Serial Attached SCSI).
Doesn’t leave many wishes unfulfilled: S2300N NAS box with a P2P client, print server, DLNA compatibility, iTunes server, UPS support, and a user-friendly confuguration interface.
The SmartStor NS2300N NAS box, which can house up to two S-ATA drives, is another interesting product. The box communicates using a Gigabit Ethernet interface. A USB 2.0 port lets users expand the storage capacity even further by attaching an external hard drive. Alternatively, the NAS-box can double as a print server. The internal hard drives can be configured as a RAID 0 or RAID 1 array. However, JBOD ("Just a Bunch of Disks"), i.e. combining several drives into one larger logical drive, is not supported by Promise.
A One-Touch-Button allows the user to start a pre-defined backup task. Promise also thought to include some feature for power users, as the unit includes an iTunes compatible server, a DLNA server, an eDonkey download client, and a user-friendly web-based management interface called SmartNavi. Beyond that, the device also supports uninterruptible power supplies (UPSs) and can automatically shut itself down when the UPS battery is low.
Promise quotes a power consumption of 39W when the device is equipped with two 250 GB hard drives. While that’s not bad, it’s also not especially frugal. We were also a bit put off by the fell of the prototype shown at CeBIT, which used seemingly cheap hard plastic.