Introduction

With more and more data being put on your home PC or server that you cant do with out, be it your tax record or personal photos. Thought of running a NAS device rather then a dedicated server or a beefed up PC for file sharing at home or work is becoming popular.

For this i originally built my FreeNAS Box (Project found here) running on an old PC with IDE HDD, runs well and can be upgraded. The problem was, well there wasn't one, the only thing for me was it was an old motherboard and would not support my new SATA HDD that i got by mistake (Should have got 2.5" not 3.5")

So, what does one do when they pay for a HDD they did not want? Ye, spend more money to make the HDD have a use, made sense at the time.

The Icybox IB-NAS4220-B is a dual bay NAS capable of RAID0, RAID1, and JBOD storage configurations.

Along side the obvious HDD storage it also has two USB ports for more extra storage, USB pen drive or such, or more likely you can add a printer and using the inbuilt print server function map the printer to all the computers on your network.

REVIEW:

Now, having had the ICE box for several months now im sure i know why i wanted one even, though getting it was a sieries of mistaken purcheses.

Inside my ICE box is now two 750GB drives due to incompatibility of two 1TB drives i got so made a swap with two drives i had a work. I opted to setup RAID1 to add that level of redundancy that makes this unit better then just a simple £70 single drive unit. It was easy to setup, popped the drives inside, booted it up and giving it a few moments to receive an IP from my DHCP server was able to log into the web interface and configure a more permanent static IP and formatting the 2 drives and setting up RAID1, and that was it.









I could have setup other features but as i was only going to use it as a data store i was happy with what i had. There does seem to be one problem, every time i have to shutdown or reboot the unit it wont start up if the ether net cable is connected.

Once i found the NAS on my Macbook it is easy to move files just as one normally would. I have mine set up so i can access all the information, however my parents can only access what is relevant to them, likewise my gf etc. Although there is a shared area also.

The NAS does have support for accessing your files over the internet vie FTP and a few router tweaks, however i have yet to set this up, yet.

Amongst other things it also has a torrent downloader installed, and having tried a few torrents, they are downloading at rates i would find on my computer.

Summary:

Overall i think this device has a lot of potential, especially with todays hard drive prices. Although i had my problem with the 1TB drive being incompatible and not being able to setup an iSCSI, I have no doubt that i will be more thankful the day i need to recover some work after my laptop or PC HDD stops working.