Seagate Central

Pros Easy setup and configuration. Excellent Read/Write performance. Great remote-access service. Integrates with Facebook; other media devices

Cons Runs a little warm. Highest storage capacity capped at 4TB. No granular user control over Facebook integration. Some performance lag within the interface. Bottom Line Seagate Central is a near-perfect NAS for home users: It's easy to set up and delivers business-class performance, but its storage is capped at 4TB.

By Samara Lynn

The Seagate Central is an impressive NAS device (Network Attached Storage) targeted at home users. This attractive, yet simply-designed piece of hardware provides easy sharing of photos, videos, music, and documents between multiple users within a home network or even outside of the home—whether on a PC, Mac, or smartphone. A bonus is that it's designed to work as a whole-home central media library for sharing and accessing data from game consoles, Smart TVs, and Blu-ray discs.

A true multimedia device, the Seagate Central is perfect for the starring role at the center of a home network. Not only is this NAS easy for home users to set up and manage, but it also offers business-class performance. My only real disappointment is that the highest capacity available for it is only 4TB. Today's home users amass such huge amounts of data; some will undoubtedly be left wanting more capacity—especially given how much they will enjoy using the Seagate Central. 

Specs and Design
Central resembles a set-top box or a flat speaker. Its footprint is small enough to easily fit into a home entertainment/media center—though it only operates as a horizontal desktop device. The Central ships in 2TB ($159.99 street) 3TB ($179.99, street), and 4TB ($219, street) models. It supports Windows XP and later and Mac OS X 10.4.9 and later. 

Seagate kept the Central's design simple. There is a lone LED on top to show when the device is active and ready to go. The rear panel has an Ethernet port for connecting to a router, as well as a USB 2.0 port for connecting USB external hard drives and printers.
I did notice during testing that the device runs a bit warm. Although it has airflow vents and sits on rubber feet so that it's not flush against a surface, you might want to place it in a location that gets decent ventilation.

Setup
A Quick Start guide is included in the packaging. The guide is sparse but gets you up and running quickly. Illustrations show users how to connect Central to a router. Once the NAS is powered up, it's ready for configuration and access when the LED turns solid green.

To configure it, fire up a browser to Seagate.com/central/setup. A webpage on Seagate's site has two clickable "Start Here" buttons—one for Mac users and the other for Windows users. 

When I clicked the Windows button, I was immediately notified on-screen that a firmware update was available. Graphical, easy-to-follow instructions are displayed on how to download and apply the update.  Next, my Central was discovered on my network. The web site will do this as long as the computer you're using and the Central are on the same network. Once located, an automatic drive mapping to the pre-created Public folder on the NAS takes place. You can see the folder by browsing in Windows Explorer.

After this quick setup, the browser redirects to the local management interface of the Central.  This interface is where you customize the device.

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Seagate Business Storage 2-Bay NAS

Pros Easy setup and HDD installation. Sharp, user-friendly interface. Anywhere, anytime remote access for users. Good drive recovery. Affordable.

Cons Performance lags a bit behind some competing NASes. Poor online documentation. Bottom Line A good performer, the Seagate Business Storage 2-Bay NAS would be fine for the smaller end of the SMB. However, there are speedier two-bay NASes, and the Seagate lacks some of the extra features in other NASes in its class.

By Samara Lynn

The Business Storage 2-Bay NAS represents the lowest-tiered model in Seagate's business-centric lineup. The two-bay model is suited for the smallest end of the SMB, say, a small organization or solo –run business. With two bays, an organization is limited as far as fault-tolerance to only disk mirroring which may not suit those with more urgent data needs (Seagate does offer a 4-bay and 8-bay rackmount model). The device performed well in testing and has some good business capabilities such as support for adding SSL certificates and joining Windows domains. There are competing two-bay NASes with speedier Read/Write performance and this Seagate unit lacks some of the extra features in other NASes in its class. 

Specs
Seagate Business Storage is a two-bay NAS that can support 4, 6, or 8TB of total storage on SATA drives. Internal components include a CNS3420 Dual Core 700MHz CPU and 512 MB DRAM.  The two-bay model ships diskless.

The front of the NAS has a tray door that opens to the two drives trays. Drive trays are easy to pop in out of the chassis, making HDD installation simple. There is also a USM—Universal Storage Model—slot on the front of the box, in which you can insert a Seagate Backup Plus portable drive. With this drive added, you can set up one-touch copy jobs to copy data from the NAS to the portable drive. This copy process allows for backup or lets you take data from the NAS with you—a good thing, because I found Seagate's provided remote access capabilities lacking. More on that later.

The one-touch copy button is on the front of the chassis as are three LEDs to indicate power, system health, and disk activity. There are two USB 3.0 ports for connecting external storage (one touch copying can also be setup for USB drives attached to the NAS).

The rear panel has dual Gigabit Ethernet ports. These ports can be aggregated within the NAS' interface to configure network connection load balancing or connection fail over.
The NAS can be configured with RAID 0, RAID 1, or JBOD (here's a basic primer on RAID). Windows XP and later are supported as is Mac OS X 10.5.8 and later, so you can incorporate this device to work with Time Machine. For those concerned with security, the NAS uses SSL/TLS-grade encryption.

Setup and Using the Business NAS
Setting up the Seagate Business NAS is simple. The device ships with a disc that includes the Seagate NAS Discovery app for locating your NAS once it's connected to your network, and the BlackArmor 2011 Backup Software. Either app is optional to install, but you are going to want to at least install the NAS Discovery app for initial setup.

Setup only entails installing the Discovery app, having it find the NAS on the network, and then clicking a Launch NAS Manager button within the Discovery app to get into the interface to configure the NAS. The hardest part of the setup is installing the drives and the sturdy drive bays make that an easy task.

The interface is sharp-looking and well-designed. It opens to a Home Page which includes a Getting Started wizard that walks you through initial housekeeping tasks such as adding users, creating folder shares, setting up backup, and more. An impressive and detailed Dashboard is accessible from the Home Page. It provides a plethora of at-a-glance information including drive health, system status, disk space, help information, and a list of getting started tasks. The only capability that would make the dashboard better would be if it was customizable—allowing you to add and remove the information you want from the menu of settings and views on the left-side of the screen.

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New hard drive tech will help Seagate crack 5TB barrier in 2014, 20TB in 2020

Seagate on Monday announced that it has sold more than 1 million drives using a new recording technology that will offer consumers 5TB hard drives next year and possibly 20TB drives by 2020.

The technology Seagate is touting—shingled magnetic recording (SMR)—is needed more than ever.

Just as NAND flash is running up against a miniaturization wall, where the circuitry has little room to continue to shrink in size, hard drives face a similar density dilemma. The data tracks on a 1TB hard-drive platter cannot afford to shrink much more, according to Seagate.

The theoretical limit of magnetic storage, called the superparamagnetic limit—about 1Tbit per square inch of storage density—is fast approaching. Increasing the density beyond that will lead to data corruption issues. Currently, Seagate's drives store data at up to 625Gbits per square inch of storage areal density.

SMR is only one of several technology advancements pushing the limits of hard drive capacity. Heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) is expected to take disk drives to 5Tbits per square inch. Seagate rival Western Digital is expected to release helium filled disk drives later this year. The helium provides less resistance than air and so will allow more platters to be stacked closer together.

"With SMR technology, Seagate is on track to improve areal density by up to 25% or 1.25TB per disk, delivering hard drives with the lowest cost per gigabyte and reaching capacities of 5TB and beyond," Mark Re, Seagate's chief technology officer, said in a statement.

Seagate would not disclose which of its drive models today use SMR. It would only say that system makers that use them know they're using them.

SeagateHow tracks are typically spaced using perpendicular magnetic recording.

The principle behind SMR is simple. With the technology, the tracks of a drive basically overlap like the shingles on a roof, thereby allowing Seagate to squeeze more tracks together.

The density problem came about when Seagate and other drive manufacturers pressed the limits of how close they could squeeze tracks together on a drive platter. For a mental picture of platter tracks, think of an LP vinyl record, except on a microscopic level.

The closer the tracks of a drive platter are squeezed together, the more data can fit in a disk drive. But, the closer together the tracks get squeezed, the greater risk of data corruption and read errors—that is, the read/write head of a hard disk drive cannot discern the difference between tracks. In between the tracks are buffer areas to help the read/write heads track accurately.

More platters can be added to a drive, as some drives have today, like a stack of pancakes, but that adds to the height of the drive.

Hard drives today typically use perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR), a method of laying down data on a platter that creates tracks that are about 75 nanometers wide, which is smaller than a flu virus. Seagate introduced its first PMR drive in 2007. The drive, the Barracuda, held 250GB of data per platter. That grew to 1TB per platter by this year.

While that seems like a lot, Seagate predicts that households currently generating 1TB of data monthly through streaming or creating content, viewing photos, and sharing music will increase that data creation by 20 times over the next two years. So, drive density must grow along with that.

The write portion of a hard drive read/write head—think of a record player needle—is what dictates the width of a track because it needs to be larger to incorporate the technology to record the data. SMR technology overlaps the write portion of tracks, leaving only the read portion exposed for the head to later find.

SeagateHow SMR offers increased density on platters by overlapping tracks

This is how it works: As new data is written, the drive tracks are trimmed, or shingled. Because the reader element on the drive head is smaller than the writer, all data can still be read off the trimmed over overlapped track without compromising data integrity or reliability.

"The HDD industry is experiencing petabyte shipment growth rates greater than 30% per year while at the same time HDD areal density is improving at a rate less than 20% per year," John Rydning, IDC's research vice president, said in a statement. "Shingled magnetic recording technology is a solution that leverages existing drive architecture to help close the gap in these growth rates while at the same time providing a relatively simple yet economical path to higher capacity HDDs for many applications."

One somewhat obvious problem, Seagate admits, is that SMR works best on a new hard drive where tracks are set down sequentially. On older drives, where old tracks are often overwritten, the writes can overlap previously written data on an adjoining track and unintentionally destroy it.

SeagateHow SMR groups tracks into bands

Because of the write overlap issue, SMR groups tracks into bands, where the shingling process stops. This enables an SMR drive to better manage rewrites. Banding also improves the drive's write performance by grouping tracks into bands that optimize the number of tracks that need to be rewritten.

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