Updated 12/15/09 The LG N2B1DD2 2 Bay Super Multi NAS with Blu-ray Disc Rewriter has been added to the NAS Charts.
The N2B1DD2 is a two-bay 2 TB 3.5" SATA NAS that also comes in BYOD (N2B1D) and 1 TB (N2B1DD1) models.
Supported volume configurations include JBOD, 0,1 and individual. Two hot-swappable drives are mounted in metal trays and neither the trays nor front cover are physically lockable.
LG has put a faster processor in the N2B1 than in its older four-drive N4B1, opting for a Marvell Kirkwood (88F6192) with 128 MB of RAM and flash instead of a Marvell 88F5281 Feroceon SoC. But they didn’t go all the way and used the slower 800 MHz version instead of the 1.2 GHz model. The single 10/100/1000 Ethernet LAN port doesn’t support jumbo frames.
Like its older sibling, the N2B1 includes three USB 2.0 ports, one eSATA port, an SD,MMC,MS,xD card reader and a built-in Blu-ray rewriter. (Also available is the N2R1D, DD1 and DD2 with DVD rewriter.) The USB ports can be used for printer sharing, UPS synchronization and backup from USB storage devices. Attached USB drives can be shared, but can’t be used as a backup target. The eSATA port appears to have no current function.
Power consumption with two Hitachi HDT721010SLA360 Deskstar 7K1000.B 1 TB drives included measured 24 W active and 9 W with the drives spun down. Fan noise from the single 3.5" fan was very low and minimal drive noise made the N2B1 very quiet.
CIFS/SMB and AFP network file systems are supported, but NFS is not. Files can also be accessed via FTP and secure HTTPS is supported for both admin access and web file access.
Media services include UPnP AV / DLNA and iTunes and a BitTorrent downloader. Other features include Apple Time Machine support, USB print server and ability to mount the internal Blu-Ray drive via iSCSI for multiple users. iSCSI is not supported for storage access.
NAS backup is primarily dependent on the Blu-ray rewriter, with daily, weekly and monthly scheduling frequency. But neither USB nor eSATA attached drives can be used for backup, nor is networked backup via rsync.
The N2B1DD2 turned in an average RAID 1 write performance using a Gigabit Ethernet connection of 37.7 MB/s for file sizes between 32 MB and 4 GB, with cached behavior not included in the average calculation. Average RAID 1 read performance was lower, measuring 31.6 MB/s with the same conditions.
File copy performance using a Vista SP1 client under the same conditions (RAID 1, Gigabit LAN) measured significantly lower for write at 17.4 MB/s, but higher for read at 40.9 MB/s. This ranked the NAS in the lower half of two-bay RAID 1 NASes, right next to the Iomega ix2-200.