Bundle

Components

Seagate Business NAS bundle

The product packaging is all 'business' keeping any unnecessarily graphical marketing to a minimum and only stating basic features (as earlier stated) and specifications. Packaging is not wasted.

Seagate Business NAS bundle

Since we have a media review unit, We are missing some items such as documentation and software, otherwise retail units should be unchanged.

If purchased, the HDDs are preloaded and pre-formatted to RAID 5 The Ethernet cable is black, unbranded and too short for a 'business' device

3 Year warranty is acceptable for this class of device but 5 would be even better.

We strongly recommend a Gigabit network for this device, 100 Megabit is too slow.

Support for Windows 8 is on the box but not the case.

Seagate Business NAS bundle

There are merits for and against External Power Supplies, however Seagate says this is a 'feature' as failed PSU can easily be replaced, the entire NAS is smaller/lighter and thermals are improved.

Since it is a generic supply this is acceptable.

Seagate Business NAS Power Supply

Disk Drives

Seagate NAS Constellation ES.3 disk drives

 

As a certain AU tech blogger offen says, there is a 'trap for young players' if we check the model number and firmware code:

Seagate Barracuda XT re-badged as Constellation ES.3

This is not a labelling mistake. The firmware is from the XT series http://forum.hddguru.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=27261 and the drive is detected as one. The XT drives themselves are long discontinued and the genuine Constellation drives have a larger buffer and 'enterprise features' in hardware/firmware.

http://www.storagereview.com/seagate_4tb_barracuda_xt_first_thoughts_review

Since Seagate does not currently sell a 4 TB 7200 RPM drive, did not have their 'NAS' drive series in market at time of NAS launch,to differentiate warranty between different products and to impress end-user and media, re badging made sense at the time.

Despite age, I don't have a problem with the old XT drives being bundled, but badging them as Constellation which really have a different model number and feature set is misleading especially at the A$1600+ p premium the 16 TB unit sells for.

See our pricing chapter to see the large difference in price between consumer, storage and enterprise class drives.

Seagate Barracuda XT re-badged as Constellation ES.3