Introduction

iNeo I-NA312N1 dual 3.5" SATA to USB/Gigabit LAN RAID 0/1 NAS enclosureInfo:
NAS units these days are getting cheaper and cheaper. In the upper consumer and SOHO range we have names like QNAP and Promise dominating the Network Attached Storage scene. There's however a large growing market for the somewhat cheaper market. Little boxes that hold two drives and can be plugged into a network often used to stream media content and thus music and movies.

A couple of years ago NAS storage units where to be found only in the enterprise and corporate environments as those solutions where not only expensive but also required an Ethernet infrastructure and a system administrator that could configure it. Some things changed over these years, our demand for massive volume storage capacity has increased, with the help of WiFi and Ethernet in general in our homes we started evolving in our lifestyle and thus requirements. It's exactly in the lifestyle segments where the latest NAS units come in. NAS units are really small handy servers that not only function as a storage device, they are getting more functionality combined with ease of use as well.

With prices going down, and everybody having high-speed LAN Ethernet at home the market is slowly adapting and targeting NAS devices at a hard to convince and very money attentive consumer. Today we'll review such a little box, it's from a  relatively unknown company called iNEO Technology. Their NAS unit is relatively cheap to purchase yet does offer all the standard features and requirements you can expect from a decent NAS unit. Full user and group based control, FTP, file sharing all the basics for secure file management.

The unit we review today is the I-NA312N1. Plain and simple it holds two HDDs and can be connected within a network with a 1 Gigabit (or slower) network link.

Interesting little gear alright. Let's have a look at what iNEO has in store for us.