Introduction and design
Not to be outdone by arch-rival storage company Western Digital, the Personal Cloud is Seagate's answer to the WD MyCloud, a NAS that makes it as simple as possible to access your stored movies, pictures, music and documents remotely.
The Personal Cloud can be used to stream video or music to a number of devices, from smartphones and tablets, to Roku, Google Chromecast and a number of smart TVs. It also supports local file system backup including Apple's Time Machine.
The Personal Cloud is sold in a number of configurations, all of which come as units with either one or two disks, indicated by the phrase '2-Bay' added to the end of the product name. There are no diskless versions available.
Capacities range from 3TB to 8TB, and are priced fairly reasonably, from £119.99 in the UK for the single-bay 3TB version (in the US this capacity goes for around $186, or $260 in Australia) and the 8TB (2 x 4TB) version goes for around £350 ($454 in the US, $633 in Australia).
Design
With mainstream users in mind, Seagate has tried to make the Personal Cloud hardware, software and setup process as simple as possible. Doing so without cutting out features or functionality can be tricky, especially since network storage can become very complicated.
Synology gets a lot of deserved praise from reviewers, as its devices seem to have hit this balance of usability and functionality well, but Seagate's efforts with the Personal Cloud are certainly commendable.
Of course, enterprise-level features aren't necessary, but secure multi-user support is paramount, even on consumer-grade models like the Personal Cloud. This is even more important, given how the Personal Cloud is designed to be opened up for use on the wider internet.
The unit is physically quite attractive. Although the underside is angled, the device is almost a perfect square with 23cm sides. At just 5cm off the ground, it's perfectly sized to fit underneath a TV.
The top is decked out in a glossy black plastic while the sides are matte. There are few distinguishing marks or features – a single white LED on the top is there to indicate power, and there is also a Seagate logo on the front and a pair of USB ports. There's a USB 3 port on the right and a USB 2 port on the back, along with the RJ-45 gigabit Ethernet port and power connector. The power button is kept out of sight at the back.
Setup
The included paper pamphlet is really just a quick-start guide, with a few diagrams that show how to plug it in to your router and access files. A more comprehensive user manual is available online.
It is possible to open the Personal Cloud unit to upgrade or replace the drives, by pressing a second button at the back, then hooking the lid off by applying a little pressure. It's not the easiest thing to do – Seagate doesn't intend the unit to be opened regularly.
Enter the Personal Cloud IP address in a browser and the first screen asks you to agree to terms and conditions. Without prompting you, if the device can get online it automatically downloads and installs firmware updates, a process that takes quite a while.
If you've gone with a 2-Bay variant with a pair of disks, the next screen asks whether you want to create a volume using RAID 0 (striping for performance) or 1 (mirroring for hardware redundancy). There's no JBOD option.
After another wait as it builds the volume, this Seagate offering then asks you to create an account for the registered owner of the device. This step is required, and you need to provide an email address, password and timezone. You're then sent an email with a registration code to activate Seagate Access, the name for the media sharing app. After the cogs and gears grind a bit more, the device is ready to use.
By default, you'll receive status emails from the device, with the results of disk checks and so on, and (presumably) any errors, if the capacity is full and so on.
The main interface has been made to look as minimalist as possible, a style that gets a big thumbs up. Everything looks really clean and inviting to use. Even progress bars are well designed and attractive.
The Home screen that greets you upon login is a set of links to the various apps on the device, with the left-most one called Device Manager being the most important, where you find all the options to set up the Personal Cloud. Running along the top are a series of links: quick shutdown, a search function, links to the manual and a simple notification system.
Under Device Manager are settings to keep an eye on disk, memory and processor usage. When you add a new user, you can create a username and password yourself, or simply add an email address, and the user will be sent a link for them to create their own password.
There's also a (paltry) selection of apps to download. One of these is a download manager for torrent files, something a lot of people want from their NAS as it lets them seed and download their torrents (of freeware Linux ISOs, naturally) without having to leave a PC on.
You can have up to 20 concurrent downloads, added either via a local file or a URL. The download and upload rates can be adjusted, and a nice touch is that when a download finishes, the NAS sends the owner an email to inform them.
Among the other apps, there's also a Plex media server and basic support for hosted Wordpress sites.
Software and performance
Streaming, Seagate Dashboard and SDrive
Many of the software features of the Personal Cloud are achieved with desktop software for both PC and Mac. Seagate Dashboard is used for automatic system backups to the Personal Cloud, and interestingly, it also allows Android users to back up their mobile devices. Video, music and pictures can be shared directly to social media.
The SDrive software is used to set up remote users, providing them with local access to the files on their private folders on the Personal Cloud – and it adds end-to-end encryption to file transfers.
Finally, the SeagateMedia app is used for streaming content, either locally or remotely, from the Personal Cloud. We're pleased to see it's not just available for Android and iOS but also Windows Phone and Amazon Kindle devices. After entering your account details, the app shows the number of documents, videos, pictures and songs on the device and allows you to load them and view them.
Note that to use this feature outside your local network, you will need to open a port in your router's firewall. If your router has UPnP enabled, this happens automatically, but otherwise you'll need to add port 39076 to its port forwarding page. Port 51413 is required to be open for torrent downloading as well.
Performance
We tested the Personal Cloud in two ways – as a NAS for local file access, like any other, and we also tested its streaming capabilities, using the SeagateMedia app. For this, we tried access via both local wireless over an 802.11ac network and over Three UK's 3G mobile network.
With a 15GB 1080p rip of Avatar, with a total bitrate of 10943 Kb/sec, streaming over wireless to an iPad was extremely smooth. After a short period of buffering, we were able to easily fast forward and zip around the film without any lag at all.
Things were a bit different over a mobile connection though. The app took a while to buffer data, then was unable to keep up with the movie, although perhaps a 4G connection would work better. Nevertheless images and music still work fine at these slower speeds.
We also ran Intel's NAS Performance Toolkit on the Personal Cloud, along with a file copy back and forth with two 5GB folders of large and small files.
Here are the benchmark results in full:
Intel NAS Performance Toolkit (MB/sec, higher is better)
- HD Video: 89.7
- 2x HD Video: 106.6
- 4x HD Video: 95.9
- HD Record: 48.4
- HD Playback Record: 79.9
- Content Creation: 8.5
- Office Productivity: 57.2
- File Copy To NAS: 59.5
- File Copy From NAS: 79.8
- Directory Copy To NAS: 6.4
- Directory Copy From NAS: 12.4
- Photo Album: 10.3
Robocopy (MB/sec, higher is better)
- Large Files Read: 81.2
- Large Files Write: 53.8
- Small Files Read: 70.3
- Small Files Write: 31.7
These results are roughly in line with Synology's entry-level NAS units, although the write speeds are notably lower. Anything involving writing data to the NAS is between 50% and 75% slower than the speeds recorded when testing the DS115J. Given that unit is diskless, but a lot cheaper, these write speed results are a tad disappointing.
Finally, I also measured its power consumption. With torrents downloading and files being written to the hard disk, I measured 15.6W of power being used, while this dropped to 12.8W when the unit was idle. Not bad results for a NAS with two hard disks.
Verdict
We liked
The Personal Cloud is really easy to set up and the interface is incredibly simple. It almost (but not quite) gives Synology a run for its money.
It's also really straightforward to add remote users, and share files with them. The torrent downloader isn't perfect, but it's still something that will appeal to a lot of people.
We disliked
The Personal Cloud isn't the fastest NAS we've ever used. With torrents coming down, the poor CPU becomes stressed and the interface is then notably less responsive.
Separately, write speeds are rather low when copying files to the NAS. We've seen better results from some USB 3 devices.
Given how good the software is, we'd love to see a cheaper diskless version, but since Seagate's main business is selling hard disks, this is unlikely.
Final verdict
The Personal Cloud is a great NAS that's unfortunately let down by poor write performance, and (at certain times) a weedy processor that slows down the interface.
This is a real shame because I loved using it and would certainly recommend it as a home NAS unit. The sharing features work really well (after some tinkering in your router's settings) and it makes a great way to watch your stored movie collection when away from home, perhaps on a wireless connection in a hotel.
If Seagate can iron out a few of the performance problems in a future variant of the Personal Cloud, it will be an absolute winner, but even as it stands, this is still one of the best home NAS units on the market.
from TechRadar: Technology reviews http://ift.tt/1PIRL3b
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