VIA ARTiGO A2000 Barebones Storage Server - VIA ARTiGO A2000

Rather than turn the A2000 into just another PC, we wanted to test with proper storage related operating systems and opted for Windows Home Server (WHS) and the highly featured FreeNAS software. Starting with WHS, we dropped a couple of Western Digital Raptor hard disks in the A2000 and booted it from the installation disk using an external USB DVD drive. This process does take a while but after an hour or so we had the A2000 up and running with WHS ready to go.


Management options are extensive as you can put a local monitor, mouse and keyboard on the A2000 or access it from the remote WHS console. Either way, we were able to configure the system to present SMB and FTP services over the network without any problems.

We found the A2000 handled WHS extremely well and didn't find that it handicapped performance at all. For real world testing we copied a 2.52GB video file over Gigabit Ethernet using another Vista system and saw respectable read and write speeds of 23.5MB/sec and 15MB/sec. FTP performance was even better with the FileZilla client utility reporting very good read and write speeds of 51.5MB/sec and 24.5MB/sec


FreeNAS installation was a far swifter process as we booted the A2000 using a DVD created from the downloaded ISO image and were up and running in less than ten minutes. Considering it's a freebie, FreeNAS really does pile on the features as it supports Windows, Unix, Linux and Mac clients and can use Active Directory authentication. Multimedia services include the Firefly iTunes server and you even get support for iSCSI targets and initiators.

The only drawback is performance as standard Windows copies using the same test file returned meagre read and write speeds of 9.2MB/sec and 8.9MB/sec. FTP speeds weren't any better with our tests returning 11MB/sec and only 4.7MB/sec.

Verdict

As a DIY storage and media streaming appliance, the ARTiGO A2000 is a remarkable little system with a lot of potential. Our only reservation is the cost of this project, as add together the price of the system, a memory module and a single 500GB hard disk and you're already over £300. For less than this you can pick up Netgear's smart little ReadyNAS Duo with a 500GB drive - we rest our case.