In the infinite evolving computer era, a trend during the past year or two is that our demand for storage has risen very much. I mean, 1TB HDDs are selling like candy, storage devices got much larger in volume  over the past year or so, 2 TB HDDs have been introduced onto the market and it surely will not stop there.

In that line of storage solutions, there are two consumer application based product series growing fast and now reaching SOHO and consumer based markets. The first are called NAS units, network attached storage. And there has been a lot of development in these nifty little boxes. They are pretty much little servers that you can hook onto your network and then have them function as file servers.

These NAS units are often small, do not use a lot of power, are highly configurable and offer redundancy as some models even handle RAID internally. NAS units are however often nearly fully configurable devices. And with complex server functions, the majority of consumers will pass as they freak out when they hear about terms like DHCP and user level administration.

This is why next to NAS, simple USB storage devices and HDD enclosures became rather popular. There is something in-between NAS and standalone HDD enclosures, and we call that technology DAS -- Device Attached Storage, for the consumer market quite a new phrase to learn and understand.

Today we test one, yes it will be more expensive than a normal HDD enclosure, yet much cheaper than a NAS device, and the unit we look at today for example is aesthetically very pleasing, can hold four high performance drives in hot-swappable drive bays. It is really fast, energy efficient, silent and comes with a plethora of connectivity towards your PC, like eSATA, USB, FireWire (400/800), of and I almost forgot ... is RAID 0|1|5 compatible.

As such the company Promise promises a lot of performance coming from this 299 USD storage unit, USB 2.0 delivers up to 40 MB/s, Firewire 400 delivers up to 50 MB/s, Firewire 800 delivers up to 80 MB/s and eSATA peaks out at a scorching 200 MB/s.

And that makes the SmartStor DS4600 a very interesting external storage solution for many applications and usage needs.

Have a peek at the product, and then on the next page we'll startup this review: