12. Conclusions

As a storage product for the SOHO and SMB markets, the SS4000-E is a good first effort for Intel. Performance is in line with the competition, including the inability to take real advantage of the gigabit ports on the box. The BYOD form provides a way to minimize the entry cost into what eventually can become a very expensive product. A home user can start with a single drive non-raid configuration and eventually work up to a robust RAID 5 NAS as his or her budget allows.

Intel has made the disk installation pretty painless, so that anyone who has installed or upgraded a computer hard drive should be able to be successful with the SS4000-E. The manual provides plenty of adequate help and support, and Intel's usual high level of Web support is also available for this device.

But, as you might expect, the SS4000-E isn't the least expensive way to get a terabyte of RAID 5 storage. At the time of posting this review, the lowest web price we found the the naked box was around $575. Add four 250 GB SATA drives at around $85 each and a 1 TB system will cost you $915. A quick check of competing products pulled up a 1 TB Buffalo Terastation Pro for around $100 less. And you can pick up a diskless Infrant ReadyNAS X6 for around $550 that not only includes built-in client backup, but media serving capability as well.

Still, the Intel name on the box is sure to give it a leg up with business users, assuming that Intel keeps its promises to fix the large file transfer and other usability bugs we've found. So welcome to the SOHO, SMB NAS show, Intel. Time will tell if you think it's worth enough to stay for the long haul.

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