LAS VEGAS—Looking for a network-attached storage option that can archive video by day and download it by night? The LenovoEMC px4-400d may be just what the doctor ordered.
LenovoEMC’s new NAS tower offers 25 percent faster throughput than its predecessor, the px4-300d, executives said. And like other NAS boxes of recent memory, BitTorrent support is now built in, providing an easy way of transferring large files back and forth. Not surprisngly, LenovoEMC is aiming the new NAS box at the small office/home office user, but also hoping to snag a portion of the “prosumer” market interested in dumping or backing up their digital life.
In short, the new px4-400d is all about speed: adding a faster 2.13GHz Atom processors inside the box boosted read and write performance by 25 percent, executives said. The box’s memory now stands at 2GB of 1333MHz DDR-3, backed by a 6GB SATA-3 controller that’s become ubiquitous for several years now. LenovoEMC will sell two versions of the box—a bare “naked” tower for about $729, or a prepopulated option. Either way, the Lenovo px4-400d will support up to 16 terabytes of capacity using four 7200-RPM SATA-3 drives, with RAID 0, 1, 0+1, 5 and 10.
Connection options include four USB 2.0 ports as well as a USB 3.0 port, as well as an HDMI connection for video output and PC-less control.
Harrdware improvements are only part of the puzzle, however. For the enthusiast, there’s Transmission, a built-in BitTorrent client that can save to the NAS.
Business owners, users, and administrators will be more interested in the support for the McAfee Policy Orchestrator that LenovoEMC added, as well as the Lenovo Storage Connector, a tool that will simply configure the NAS if it’s detected by another Lenovo device running Windows 8.1. In other respects, the px4-400d carries over other aspects of the 300d, including McAfee VirusScan Enterprise, Windows Active Directory High Availability (ADHA), Hybrid Authentication, MSCS and Hyper-V Live Migration support. It’s also ready for video surveillance with the Milestone Arcus software package.
Performance has traditionally been the anchor holding NAS solutions back; by increasing the speed of the internal components, LenovoEMC hopes to make that problem go away.