Bundle
Components
The product packaging is all 'business' keeping any unnecessarily graphical marketing to a minimum and only stating basic features (as earlier stated) and specifications. Packaging is not wasted.
Since we have a media review unit, We are missing some items such as documentation and software, otherwise retail units should be unchanged.
If purchased, the HDDs are preloaded and pre-formatted to RAID 5 The Ethernet cable is black, unbranded and too short for a 'business' device
3 Year warranty is acceptable for this class of device but 5 would be even better.
We strongly recommend a Gigabit network for this device, 100 Megabit is too slow.
Support for Windows 8 is on the box but not the case.
There are merits for and against External Power Supplies, however Seagate says this is a 'feature' as failed PSU can easily be replaced, the entire NAS is smaller/lighter and thermals are improved.
Since it is a generic supply this is acceptable.
Disk Drives
As a certain AU tech blogger offen says, there is a 'trap for young players' if we check the model number and firmware code:
This is not a labelling mistake. The firmware is from the XT series http://forum.hddguru.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=27261 and the drive is detected as one. The XT drives themselves are long discontinued and the genuine Constellation drives have a larger buffer and 'enterprise features' in hardware/firmware.
http://www.storagereview.com/seagate_4tb_barracuda_xt_first_thoughts_review
Since Seagate does not currently sell a 4 TB 7200 RPM drive, did not have their 'NAS' drive series in market at time of NAS launch,to differentiate warranty between different products and to impress end-user and media, re badging made sense at the time.
Despite age, I don't have a problem with the old XT drives being bundled, but badging them as Constellation which really have a different model number and feature set is misleading especially at the A$1600+ p premium the 16 TB unit sells for.
See our pricing chapter to see the large difference in price between consumer, storage and enterprise class drives.
