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Seagate BlackArmor NAS 220 2- Bay 6 TB (2 x 3 TB) Network Attached Storage STAV6000100, Black

by Seagate
3.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (100 customer reviews)

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Technical Details

Capacity: 6 TB
  • Designed to provide centralized storage and data backup for up to 20 PCs
  • Enables automatic data mirroring with RAID 1 configuration
  • Protect network connected PCs with incremental and full-system, automatic backup
  • Functions as an FTP server for remote file access
  • Stream media to DLNA compliant devices and computers running iTunes software
  • Connect external drives, share a printer or utilize an uninterrupted power supply with the two USB 2.0 ports
  • Includes two reliable, user-replaceable Seagate hard drives
  • Time Machine software compatible, for Mac computer backup
  See more technical details

Product Details

  • Product Dimensions: 7.4 x 4.1 x 7.8 inches ; 8.4 pounds
  • Shipping Weight: 8.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Shipping: Currently, item can be shipped only within the U.S.
  • ASIN: B0046TSGNE
  • Item model number: STAV6000100
  • Average Customer Review: 3.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (100 customer reviews)
  • Date first available at Amazon.com: November 19, 2010

Product Description

Capacity: 6 TB

The BlackArmor NAS 220 server is a small-business-specific network attached storage solution designed to provide centralized storage and data backup, helping to deliver business continuity for up to 20 PCs. Automatically backup business-critical data with RAID 1 mirroring, full-system backup, SafetyDrill+ bare metal recovery software and powerful hardware-based encryption.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews
38 of 38 people found the following review helpful
By David
Size Name:2 TB
I've owned the Seagate NAS 220 for about a month now and I have been blown away. The 2 TB unit has two one-terabyte drives and gives you the ability to choose whether you want more space (RAID 0) or more reliability (RAID 1). I opted for greater reliability.

There are three things that really impressed me with this product:

The speed: With the RAID 1 setup, when you read a file from the NAS, you're reading it from 2 hard rives simultaneously, and over a gigabit connection this means I can copy files from the hard drive at 40 megabytes per second. Writing is half that, about 20 megabytes per second.

The power consumption + noise: I figured I would hide this somewhere to prevent hearing it, but its so quiet that I keep it on top of my desk so I can see it. It's visually appealing to look at. Also, the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) is very low. When reading/writing from the drive, it uses about 18 watts, which at $.10/kWh is about $16 annually if it is running 24/7. It has an auto sleep mode which makes the TCO even lower. Compare this to a PC file server which can cost a few hundred dollars in electricity.

The simplicity: I plugged it in and went to the web based console (no software required) and answered a few questions and I was done. It works from Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows XP and OS X 10.6. I gave it 4 stars in the features area because it might be a little over simplified, but that is only because I am a power user.

All in all, I'm extremely pleased with it. I will even recommend this product to small businesses who need network storage.
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63 of 67 people found the following review helpful
Size Name:4 TB|Amazon Verified Purchase
I feel like I'm in a good place to review this item because I own both the Seagate 220 and also the Western Digital MyBook World Edition, and they are competitors. Both are inexpensive network attached storage appropriate for a home office or for home use. For both machines the only feature I use is reading and writing to the hard drive through windows sharing (from either a windows computer or a linux computer). For that reason I will not comment too much on some of the features like automatic backups, media sharing, etc. For the most part on machines of this level those features are gimmicks. They don't work very well and they degrade overall performance of the NAS, as you will be able to read from other people's reviews. When I want to play media from my NAS, I just mount the drive through windows sharing and play what I want. When I want to back up my computer, I copy stuff myself. For the reason I have a generally more favourable view of both of these machines than other people.

Anyway, on with the review. First I will mention two issues I had to overcome before this NAS was reasonably functional for me.

1. This is the big issue I had to fix: This Seagate NAS does not work well with just any gigabit switch. I originally had it plugged in to a TP-Link switch. I could write to the NAS at full speed, but when I wanted to read from it, the speed was horrible. Maybe 1/20th the speed at which I could write to the NAS. After spending a good deal of time researching the issue online I found out the NAS doesn't play well with some routers and switches. Notably it does not work with D-Link switches. Well, I will add TP-Link to the list it doesn't work with. If I plugged the NAS directly into my Linksys router, the problem went away, but that's only a 100-megabit connection. The funny thing is that the traffic still had to go through the TP-Link switch. In other words, the device this is directly plugged into matters, the rest of the network really doesn't. Anyway I tried various solutions (changing the frame size and so forth). They don't work. The only solution was to buy a netgear switch. If your network has a TP-Link or D-Link switch or router that you'd like to plug this into, budget for a netgear gigabit switch. They aren't real expensive, but I was very annoyed at this problem.

2. This is a small issue, and partly windows' fault: If you create a shortcut to this shared drive in windows and then play a movie from the NAS, it will disconnect 20 minutes into the movie. I originally thought this had to do with the NAS going into sleep mode, but I disabled that feature and it didn't change anything. I didn't notice the problem when playing from my linux machine, and the WD NAS doesn't do this. Anyway, the solution is to actually map the drive in "My Computer" instead of just using a shortcut to get to it. You'd think there would be no difference between those two, but the former works and the latter disconnects after 20 minutes.

Having overcome those two problems, the NAS now functions very nicely for me. The main thing I use this NAS for is to play movies that I have ripped from my DVD collection. They play perfectly on any computer in the house and I can even play two movies on two different computers. Actually I'm not sure how many movies I can play at a time. Nor have I tried playing any HD movies yet, so I can't comment on that, but the speed over my gigabit network seems more than adequate for that.

A couple of comparisons with the Western Digital:

1. This machine is significantly faster than the Western Digital. When I upload to this machine from my Linux box I sustain about 18 or 19 megabytes per second. On the Western Digital I get about 11. This may not sound like a big difference here, but when copying a large file or backing up a whole computer, it makes a very noticeable difference. I don't pay a lot of attention to my download copy speed, but it is above 30 MB per second, whereas I get more like 19 from the Western Digital. I am running this in a RAID 0 configuration. However, I also did a speed test using JBOD and the speeds were exactly the same, so the gain is not really from the RAID (the WD I use has only one HD in it, so there's no RAID option).

2. The Seagate is significantly louder than the Western Digital. It's not loud compared to most hardware, but you can hear the drives spinning if you get close and listen, and when they start up or go to sleep you can hear a click that is pretty noticeable. Sometimes it clicks when no one is using it and you would think it would just be sleeping peacefully. At first I thought this was a hardware problem but it turns out that my NAS is fine. It's just louder than expected. Of course, WD sets the bar high for silence. It is almost impossible to tell if the WD machine is on or doing anything if you ignore the lights on the front (or disable them, as I have).

3. The Seagate is much larger physically. It's not big on an absolute scale, and I don't keep it on my desktop, so it's not a problem, but it's much larger than the WD. The WD is just a hair larger than the actual drive inside it. The Seagate looks like a UPS or something. Anyway I think it looks nice, but one should be aware that it's not as minimalist as some others.

4. The Seagate doesn't try to accommodate tweaks from expert users as much, and it has a much smaller and less active user base. Both machines run Linux under the hood, so if there's a problem with them an experienced user could get in and change things up. On the Western Digital you can enable ssh access through the web interface. And there are bunches of tutorials online about how to fix the technical glitches this comes with and even install new hardware on it. Personally I went in and disabled their media playing software and the software that runs an apple network. Apparently on the WD these things run even though you disabled them and they mess the machine up. Anyway, there is no ssh option on the seagate, so in principle you can't go in and change things. There aren't really help pages for experts. However, recently a user did figure out a way to enable ssh. He wrote an update to the firmware. I used it and it works great, but I can see how some users may not feel comfortable upgrading their firmware in order to get ssh access. Anyway after ssh'ing in, I found that there is one windows bug that the NAS wasn't dealing with well. That is, windows clients delete the last character of the share when they are reading and it causes a bunch of errors to the log, though it still seems to work ok. The workaround is to create another share on the NAS that is not visible, called "Publi", which refers to the same directory. So I'm glad to be ssh'ing in now. Still, for tweaking, it's a better bet to go with the WD. It's been vetted by more linux people.

Anyway, this drive works very well for me. It's my larger and higher performance network attached storage and it is quite reliable for me. When I purchased it, this was cheaper than the equivalent capacity in WD (I use the 4 TB version). In part I believe I'm happy with it because I don't try and use the features that get touted in ads. I just use it as network attached storage. That's true of both drives, and it's what I recommend. The forums for both these machines are full of people ranting about how their device doesn't do what they want and that no one at the company seems to care about them---that's why I say just use it as a remote hard drive. Based on my perusal of the forums, Seagate seems to support their NAS customers less (at least on the forums), though neither company is real great in that respect.

I love both of my network storage devices and I use them both all the time. This seagate is a great buy. When I bought it, at least, it was the cheapest NAS available with this capacity and it turns out to be a very good performer. It's really nice to be able to back things up or store all my large files in one place and be able to access them from any computer in my house. If I were to buy a third NAS, it would probably be another Seagate, just because it's cheaper and faster than the competition.

But make sure you plug it into a NETGEAR device, not a TP-Link or D-Link. I'm not sure about other brands.

======================= Edit Oct 2011 ===========================

Well I've had this for almost a year now and about a month ago it stopped behaving well. Specifically it started reading from the disk all the time. It's caught in some kind of infinite loop and I can hear it ticking away all day long. It no longer goes to sleep. Also, when I play movies from it there is jitter every time it multitasks from doing what I asked it to do to whatever it is stuck doing.

It's not being used by anything, I've rebooted about a million times, and I even installed a firmware update to no avail (it is using the latest firmware as of Oct 2011). I even installed the ssh hack and tried really hard to identify what process is causing this effect using linux tools--in vain.

These days I have to physically turn it off to keep it from constantly reading and rereading from the disk. I'm thinking about copying everything off of it and reimaging the whole thing--starting from scratch. Unfortunately I now have so much stuff on it that it won't fit on any other hard drives I own.

So anyway, there's some bug in the software that doesn't come up for almost a year but then becomes really annoying. It's been an OK NAS for some time, but I think the several issues I've had, combined with the louder noise and the slower speed relative to the new Western Digital offering make Western Digital a much better alternative. Read more ›
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29 of 29 people found the following review helpful
By RWCinCT
Size Name:4 TB|Amazon Verified Purchase
I've worked in IT since 1983. I've had lots of units (Western Digital - UGH!) and this Seagate unit has been the best of it's kind, though it's not for the technologically challenged.

If you are looking for a drive you can plug in and use, you'll need to do a bit of work to get this up and running, but once configured - it's hands off for everything else. I would not recommend this to someone who doesn't have a good understanding of setting up disk shares/users/groups or isn't willing to read up on these subjects to configure the device.

It's relatively easy to setup for the technically savvy but not so easy to setup if you're a computer novice. The machine plugs directly on your home network (router/hub) and can be accessed by any device that will connect to a 'shared' drive. It does not have wireless connectivity, but if you connect it into a wireless hub, you can access it via a wireless device (e.g. a wireless laptop running iTunes or Windows Media or just as a shared drive).

This unit has a 'media service' that lets you publish a share as a music source and access it from iTunes on other computers. It can be accessed via a variety of file sharing protocols so if you've got a mixed environment at home (Windows, MAC, Linux), this machine is great. It also has a wiki feature - though I can't find a use for it at home but might work in a small office environment or if you keep track of things (recipes??) and need a storage mechanism.

This unit also can be configured to send e-mail alerts for various events (reboot, shutdown) and has a web interface for configuration. It comes with a utility for Windows PCs to detect the unit on the network - but the web interface must be used to configure the device so if you're using MAC/LINUX, you'll need to know how to look at your router to figure out what IP address the machine got, if you have automatic IP addressing (DHCP) on your router/hub. From there you use the IP address to get to the device via a web browser. The Windows utility does this easily, but it's not too difficult if you know how to do the above.

For those who are not technologically savvy (I'm trying to leave out most of the technobabble here), some of the settings may be a bit daunting (NFS, CIFS, FTP) and the concept of creating 'shares' and setting access levels and creating user accounts. However, if you are using this in a family setting and you want to setup separate areas for each member of the family (or create a 'private' area only accessible to a select group) then this unit can do this - but you need to know what you are doing.

This unit comes with two-2 terabyte drives which can used separately or be configured in a mirror formation (a.k.a. RAID 1). If you don't use mirroring, you get 4 terabytes of space but if you lose a drive due to failure, you lose the data on that drive. By using mirroring, both disks have exactly the same information on them which will always give you a backup if one of the drives fails. The only downside of mirroring is that you lose half of the space since both drives 'mirror' each other and contain exactly the same information. I highly recommend using mirroring - This way, if either one of the drives fails, you can replace it and not lose your data. This was an important feature for me - I rely on it to store the bulk of my data without having to do regular backups (who does those at home??).

Compared to Western Digital, Seagate (in my opinion and experience) has much more reliable disk drives. I've bought and lost two Western Digital units (USB/Firewire) and will never buy another.

If you want to have a unit that you can use for all of your data and store your iTunes on it (and access it from MAC and Windows and Linux as I do), then this unit is an excellent option.

If you have someone in your family who's good with computers, ask for assistance to set it up - it's worth getting this unit especially in a multi-user environment. If you're by yourself and/or know very little about computers and don't need the device to be accessible by any other than one PC, consider something you can connect directly to your PC instead.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
Very bad device - slow and limited
From the internet it looked like a very nice device, even if a bit expensive.
I soon discovered that in my company:
- I couldn't receive email notifications from it,... Read more
Published 1 month ago by texts
More Tortise than Hare
Its a shame because this box is a very attractive looking piece of equipment, has no downtime (and mine has been up for over a year now), and didn't have any bugs you needed to... Read more
Published 1 month ago by John Malachowski
Very disappointed with the Blackarmor NAS 220
I sought a decent Raid 1 backup solution that would also double as a media server for my business. The Blackarmor NAS 220 was not only a major disappointment, but it's quite... Read more
Published 3 months ago by Coffee Infusion
Decent, inexpensive deep storage
We deployed the NAS-220 with 2 1TB drives configured as RAID1 about a year ago for deep storage of files more than a year old, and so far it has worked well. Read more
Published 3 months ago by Pete Crozier
The Seagate NAS220 is DLNA Compatible and works as a media server
I have seen people complain that this devicse is not DLNA compatible, however, it is. It working great as a media server to my Sony Blu Ray drives and Samsung TV that are all DLNA... Read more
Published 4 months ago by Pamela J. Knight
Horrible DLNA Server
This is an incredibly horrible DLNA server. IT is not DLNA Certified. In the original software versions, it worked partially, but now, the Server does not respond at all. Read more
Published 4 months ago by Amala Gnanapragasam
Good Product/Good Value
This network attached storage device has been a great addition to our office. Five computers (PCs and Macs in two buildings) access and save files to the NAS. Read more
Published 4 months ago by F. Allen
DLNA Doesn't work
This device does not work correctly with many (if any) DLNA certified devices, only a fraction of the actual files are served up to media players, in my case, about 25 of over 100... Read more
Published 5 months ago by buyer
easy to setup and use
Setup is very easy. The included software made everything a breeze. Will definitely buy again if I need another one of these.
Published 5 months ago by JOHN A COX
Lots of trouble
I bought a Seagate Barracuda 2TB NAS in 2009; it died in 6 months and Seagate sent me a Black Armor 220 as a replacement under warrantee. Read more
Published 5 months ago by Bradley A. Woodruff
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Capacity: 6 TB