One of the inexcusable drawbacks to the N2A2 NAS appliance is the fact that the user has no access to the
internal hard disks without voiding the warranty. The appliance can be opened up by removing the screws around the edges of the back panel (including the one under the warranty void sticker)
What can the user do in case of hardware failure? We explore the possibilities in a RAID-1 configuration. This allows for redundancy and is the best possible configuration in the LG N2A2 NAS for important data.
Disconnecting one of the SATA drives and connecting it to a PC enables us to check on the two failure scenarios:
- NAS motherboard failure : In this case, the hard disks should be healthy, and connecting one of the disks to a PC should enable data recovery
- Hard disk failure : In this case, we assume at least one of the hard disks should be healthy. The NAS unit should still be able to operate in a degraded mode.
Preparing the N2A2 for Failure Testing
The LG N2A2 NAS enables data recovery in both the above failure scenarios. The appliance correctly indicates the degraded operation mode and also notifies the user of the same through e-mail.
The RAID implementation is the standard mirroring and there is no proprietary twist here with respect to the data duplication. We tested a couple of NAS data recovery softwares, and both of them were able to recognize the connected hard disk's EXT3 file system. Windows 7 is obviously not able to recognize the file system, but UFS Explorer was able to correctly detect and recover the data.
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Visual - Tuesday, July 19, 2011 - link
Stop wasting time with crap like this.If you mean to review NAS boxes, find some that are actually worth it, with space for 5 or 6 3.5" drives in RAID 5, preferably with hot-swap support, or just don't bother.
ganeshts - Tuesday, July 19, 2011 - link
Point noted. But, we also need to target home consumer solutions.The 5 / 6 drive RAID5 solutions you mention are targeted towards SMBs, and we do cover those too. By the way, we have two boxes which came in after this currently in the review queue (QNAP and Netgear), and I am just starting out with the benchmarking for those.
dhiiir - Friday, July 22, 2011 - link
I have been using Version 1 for several years and it works great. Version 2 is getting good reviews although a few people were upset that it doesn't continue the use of Drive Extender. That didn't bother me too much as there are add-ons for DE if you really feel you need that functionality. The Newegg price for WHS is very tempting.[[ w w w -( upsfashion )- c o m ]]I personally feel that the site is very good, there are many things we need, so I want to share with everyone. I believe you will like it.freez3 - Saturday, February 11, 2012 - link
Hi @ll,first many thanks to AnandTech for the great testings on this NAS.
It was very nice to see that you have also a deep lock at last single detail,
data recovery when the main board breaks down.
You have done a great job!
Did some body has experience with the NFS shares on this LG NAS?
I was a little bit surprised as I have seen this feature in the Web Interface,
because of it was not tested here and it was also not in the feature list of LG and shop I've bought it
After a quick test, the disillusion I've realized that NFS on N2A2DF2 is very slow only 2 MB/S writing,
with a mirrored 2TB HDD drives.
Perhaps one of my settings are wrong.
Thanks for your help!
Regards
Freez3