Ultimate Storage Norco DS-1220 review

The eSATA port is proving to be a popular interface of choice for DAS appliances, since it delivers far superior performance to USB. We've reviewed a number of solutions in PC Pro Business, with Buffalo's DriveStation Quattro TurboUSB delivering particularly impressive speeds over eSATA.

The Norco DS-1220 takes eSATA to its next logical step, as it combines a rack mount disk enclosure with a quad-port eSATA PCI-E card and delivers a high storage potential. The main enclosure is a well built 3U rack chassis, and the price for the review system includes 12 500GB Seagate Barracuda ES hard disks held in solid hot-swap carriers.

With no onboard RAID controllers and cache memory to cool, the array itself is very quiet. Three large fans at the rear handle all air movement through the chassis, and we found noise level to be very low. The DS-1220 isn't a power hog, either, with our in-line power meter recording only 97W in idle and 112W under load.

The chassis backplane incorporates a pair of Silicon Image SATA port multipliers, so from the front you have one looking after drive bays 1-5, the other handling bays 6-10, and these are routed to ports 3 and 4 respectively on the rear panel. The two remaining drive bays are wired directly to ports 1 and 2.

These are accompanied by a PS/2 connector allowing drive status LED activity to be directed via the bundled cable from the host controller card. It isn't the most elegant of solutions, as the supplied PS/2 header card for the host will take up a spare expansion slot.

For testing, we installed the controller in a Boston Supermicro dual 3GHz Xeon 5160 system running Windows Server 2003 R2. Don't try using the controller's BIOS menu to create RAID arrays, as it can only see one drive per port. All RAID array configuration must be done from the SATARaid5 Windows utility, where on loading it displayed the correct number of drives per eSATA port.

The utility supports stripes, mirrors, RAID5 and JBODs, and a concatenated mode that simply joins all the drives together in a single large volume - useful if you have drives of varying size, but redundancy is a casualty.

When creating arrays you can provide a name, decide on their physical capacity and select a stripe size. Usefully, arrays can be created across drives on different ports. The utility provides a basic set of notification options as a pop-up window can be used to advise on error, warning or informational log entries and you can decide where the log file should reside.

For testing, we created a simple five drive RAID0 stripe using all drives on the fourth channel. The management interface keeps you advised on drive status, which ones are being used, and any that are still available. Overall, real-world performance was good, as copying a 4.5GB disk image file between the appliance and the host system returned average read and write speeds of 78MB/sec and 69MB/sec.

Considering the price includes 6TB of raw storage, the Norco DS-1220 looks good value. It isn't the most elegant of storage solutions and the RAID utility is unpolished, but if you want more than the current crop of desktop eSATA appliances have to offer then this is worth closer investigation.

Author: Dave Mitchell