Acer Altos easyStore

Data recovery is handled smoothly, as the backups on the appliance are presented as iSCSI targets. After you've selected a drive or partition backup and provided the correct password, DiskSafe logs the initiator onto it and assigns a drive letter so you can access the data using nothing more than Windows Explorer. The utility also allows you to restore entire non-system partitions.

For bare metal recovery, the client is booted with the supplied CD-ROM, which loads FalconStor's recovery environment and iSCSI initiator. It runs a hardware inventory and attempts to load drivers for the disk subsystem and network adapters, but you might want to keep these handy, since we found it only has embedded drivers for the more common products. Once the system has an IP address, you provide the names of client and server, enter the recovery password and select a partition or drive to restore. Speed was similar to backups, with our 8GB system partition restored successfully at a rate of 8.6MB/sec.

In general, the NAS functions of the easyStore are comparatively simplistic, making products such as Buffalo's TeraStation Pro II a better bet if shared storage is all you need. However, Acer is delivering a good-value package with an interesting iSCSI angle that makes it particularly desirable if workstation data restoration and bare metal recovery are high priorities.

Author: Dave Mitchell