ioSafe NAS Review
I became involved with my Synology NAS about 9 months ago. We’re still in the honeymoon stages of our relationship, but I can honestly say that my storage has never been better.
But sometimes my eye wanders. I see the USB 3 and Thunderbolt drives and think to myself, briefly, I wonder what the throughput is with one of those beauties. But reason always takes over and I realize what a wonderful thing I have going with my Synology. It’s stable, provides a good foundation for my paranoia and continues to impress me with it’s flexibility.
However, the first potential challenger has made inroads. The ioSafe has caught my attention in ways the Synology just can not match.
If you are familiar with a NAS, the ioSafe will seem like a mediocre choice. It accepts two drives in a couple of configurations. If you are familiar with Synology, you’ll be a bit more impressed. The ioSafe runs the same DSM as a Synology NAS. That means it comes with a little unix server inside with one-click management.
The Synology DSM is a miracle of modern backup. It’s not just a disk manager package. If you want, it’s an email server, a web server, an FTP host, an iTunes media server and many more things. All of these features come at the beckon of a single mouse click. There’s little to fiddle with and much to use.
The ioSafe runs a fully functional version of DSM but does so in a suit of armor. The ioSafe is a waterproof and fireproof NAS that also happens to run the best NAS operating system around.
I tested the ioSafe for about a month and I can find no discernible difference from a standard Synology NAS. Well, except for the exceptional build quality.
The casing is metal. Real metal. Not plastic painted to look like metal.
Removing the drives requires a wrench! The ioSafe N2 includes the wrench and a handy magnet for attaching to the back of the drive. But just look at this monster. This is top notch stuff.
The Apocalypse NAS
But here’s the thing about the ioSafe: It’s not a typical NAS. This is your apocalypse NAS. This is the drive that will survive brimstone and floods.
The ioSafe is water proof to 10 ft for 72 hours and fire resistant up to 1550 °F for 30 minutes. In addition, the N2 comes with a data recovery service that will spend up to $2500 per terabyte to reclaim your data. Those are features that are pretty hard to compete with.
Not to mention, if your house is robbed, I’d bet the thieves leave this thing behind. It’s just too damn heavy. It’s a monster at 30 lbs with disks. This is the most substantial piece of technology I’ve used.
The biggest downside to the ioSafe is that it only holds two drives. That means with RAID 1 and 2 X 3TB disks, you get 3TB of storage with redundancy. It’s a little embarrassing to consider 3TB of storage insufficient but it feels small for a NAS.
So what will all of this cost you? It’s $600 without disks but that doesn’t include the data recovery insurance. The price increases from there at about $300 per 2TB. The disks are provided in pairs but includes the data recovery insurance. At the top end you get 8TB installed for $2,000.
That’s steep, but if your livelihood depends on your data, this is probably a pretty cheap peace of mind. It’s pretty difficult to compare the ioSafe N2 to any other solution. It’s a one of a kind backup server.
Conclusion
I’m sending the ioSafe back1 but I thought really hard about it. It’s not cheap. If I didn’t already have a small fort around my desk built from terabyte drives and NAS', I’d happily spring for the ioSafe. It’s not just a good backup device, it’s a peace of mind that’s hard to replicate with off-the-shelf hardware. I can fully endorse this device if you can afford it.
ioSafe N2 | >$600
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It’s been packed with a shipping label next to my desk for weeks but I kind of suck at shipping. ↩︎