A look at the box
Measuring 260mm x 140mm x 260mm and weighing in at around 5kg with no drives installed, the BrontaStor 4TE fits right into the four-bay NAS mould.
Pricing starts at £799, including VAT, for a model equipped with 1GB of RAM and four 1TB Samsung Spinpoint F3 hard drives pre-installed. The bare NAS box is available for £497.99, should you wish to provide your own drives
Our high-end review sample arrived pre-configured with 2GB of RAM, four 2TB Hitachi 7K2000 hard drives and an Open-E 8TB license, totalling up to £1,259.09. Complete specifications and configuration options can be found at Armari.com, but we'll take a look at the key points below.
Inside the sleek-but-minimalistic unit resides a dual-core 1.60GHz Intel Atom 330 processor, coupled with either 1GB or 2GB of DDR2 667MHz memory. The CPU, dating back to 2008 and featuring a low 8W TDP, is ideal for use in a four-bay NAS.
Looking at the BrontaStor 4TE head on, the first thing you'll notice is that, unlike most modern NAS solutions, there's no integrated display. Instead, the front door is subtly transparent to allow the user to see a series of status LEDs housed behind it.
We'd prefer a system that can display messages, but if you do run into trouble, you can remotely access the system - more on that later - or hook up a VGA display.
Opening the lockable magnet front door reveals access to the unit's four SATA II drive bays - which support only 3.5in hard drives, and a current maximum storage capacity of up to 8TB using four 2TB disks.
Plenty of storage capacity, but there is a proviso to be aware of; Armari ships the BrontaStor 4TE with the 64-bit Open-E DSS V6 Lite storage management software installed on an internal USB DOM, and provides a license allowing for storage configurations of up to 4TB. Raising the capacity limit to 6TB will require a £60 license upgrade, and it'll then cost another £76 to upgrade to the maximum 8TB license.
It's an open-ended software scenario, with users paying for what they need. Those wanting to upgrade from the Lite version of Open-E DSS V6 to the full-fat version - which brings with it support for features such as asynchronous volume replication over LAN - can do so at a cost of £495. It's worth noting that the BrontaStor 4TE isn't equipped with the hardware to take advantage of certain features of the full Open-E DSS V6 software - 10Gb Ethernet, for example - and it's an upgrade most users won't consider.
In its default configuration, there's ample on offer - including support for RAID modes 0, 1, 5, 6 and JBOD in NAS or iSCSI configuration, support for automatic rebuild, and support for Windows, Mac, Linux and UNIX clients - as well as the ability to join Windows domain using Active Directory.
Alongside the four SATA II drive bays are a series of activity LEDs and the BrontaStor 4TE's three buttons - power on/off, mute (used to mute audible alarms) and reset.
Just above the LEDs and front controls are two USB 2.0 ports - which are used only for keyboard and mouse connectivity; the bundled Open-E operating system doesn't offer support for USB printers or USB storage expansion.
Although the Armari chassis provisions for a memory card reader, the slots aren't used on the BrontaStor 4TE. Looking ahead, however, Armari informs us that the same chassis will be used for a future Windows Home Server box. That's expected to be available later this year with Microsoft's latest Vail operating system.
A look at the unit's rear shows a further two USB ports - again only able to accept a keyboard and mouse - along with VGA output and dual Gigabit LAN.
A duo of 80mm fans can be seen attached to the hard-disk backplane, and a third 60mm fan is front-mounted to provide airflow to the CPU and chipset.