Thursday, 3 October 2013
PCMag Business Choice Awards 2013
Welcome to the first annual PCMag Business Choice Awards. For two decades, we have been augmenting our in-depth labs-based product reviews with our Readers' Choice Awards, in which PCMag readers rate the products and services they use the most. The Business Choice Awards extend the scope of these awards by garnering feedback about the hardware, software, and services our readers deploy, administer, maintain, and use in a business environment.
For our inaugural PCMag Business Choice Awards we asked our readers about 10 different categories that are critical to keeping businesses functional and connected. Our survey covers core hardware products including laptops, desktops, printers, routers, and network attached storage (NAS). We also looked at key software categories: accounting, customer relationship management (CRM), and enterprise resource planning (ERP). Finally, we queried readers about smartphones and tablets, two ancillary computing devices becoming critical to all types of workers.
Our survey asked respondents to rate their overall satisfaction with the products they use or for which they are responsible and the likelihood they would recommend them to others. We also asked about their satisfaction with the technical support and, in the case of hardware products, repair service they receive. In many of the categories respondents also provided feedback on whether or not they felt the item was good value.
If you're responsible for selecting, deploying, or administering the products in the following categories, or if you advise or manage people in these roles, you know how critical it is to choose the right products. We think you'll find the results of the PCMag Business Choice Awards survey invaluable in doing so.
This survey was in the field from August 5, 2013 to August 25, 2013. Each person who completed the survey was entered into a drawing to win a Lenovo IdeaPad Z400 Touch worth $700.
Seagate Business Storage 2-Bay NAS
The Business Storage 2-Bay NAS represents the lowest-tiered model in Seagate's business-centric lineup. The two-bay model is suited for the smallest end of the SMB, say, a small organization or solo –run business. With two bays, an organization is limited as far as fault-tolerance to only disk mirroring which may not suit those with more urgent data needs (Seagate does offer a 4-bay and 8-bay rackmount model). The device performed well in testing and has some good business capabilities such as support for adding SSL certificates and joining Windows domains. There are competing two-bay NASes with speedier Read/Write performance and this Seagate unit lacks some of the extra features in other NASes in its class.
Specs
Seagate Business Storage is a two-bay NAS that can support 4, 6, or 8TB of total storage on SATA drives. Internal components include a CNS3420 Dual Core 700MHz CPU and 512 MB DRAM. The two-bay model ships diskless.
The front of the NAS has a tray door that opens to the two drives trays. Drive trays are easy to pop in out of the chassis, making HDD installation simple. There is also a USM—Universal Storage Model—slot on the front of the box, in which you can insert a Seagate Backup Plus portable drive. With this drive added, you can set up one-touch copy jobs to copy data from the NAS to the portable drive. This copy process allows for backup or lets you take data from the NAS with you—a good thing, because I found Seagate's provided remote access capabilities lacking. More on that later.
The one-touch copy button is on the front of the chassis as are three LEDs to indicate power, system health, and disk activity. There are two USB 3.0 ports for connecting external storage (one touch copying can also be setup for USB drives attached to the NAS).
The rear panel has dual Gigabit Ethernet ports. These ports can be aggregated within the NAS' interface to configure network connection load balancing or connection fail over.
The NAS can be configured with RAID 0, RAID 1, or JBOD (here's a basic primer on RAID). Windows XP and later are supported as is Mac OS X 10.5.8 and later, so you can incorporate this device to work with Time Machine. For those concerned with security, the NAS uses SSL/TLS-grade encryption.
Setup and Using the Business NAS
Setting up the Seagate Business NAS is simple. The device ships with a disc that includes the Seagate NAS Discovery app for locating your NAS once it's connected to your network, and the BlackArmor 2011 Backup Software. Either app is optional to install, but you are going to want to at least install the NAS Discovery app for initial setup.
Setup only entails installing the Discovery app, having it find the NAS on the network, and then clicking a Launch NAS Manager button within the Discovery app to get into the interface to configure the NAS. The hardest part of the setup is installing the drives and the sturdy drive bays make that an easy task.
The interface is sharp-looking and well-designed. It opens to a Home Page which includes a Getting Started wizard that walks you through initial housekeeping tasks such as adding users, creating folder shares, setting up backup, and more. An impressive and detailed Dashboard is accessible from the Home Page. It provides a plethora of at-a-glance information including drive health, system status, disk space, help information, and a list of getting started tasks. The only capability that would make the dashboard better would be if it was customizable—allowing you to add and remove the information you want from the menu of settings and views on the left-side of the screen.
Sunday, 16 June 2013
Managing Director, Business Development at Sunedison (Belmont, CA) (simplyhired)
Sunday, 26 May 2013
Motorola RDU4100 RDX Series On Site UHF 4 Watt 10 Channel Two Way Business Radio
Product Reviews
Motorola RDU2020 RDX Series On-Site UHF 2 Watt 2 Channel Two Way Business Radio
Product Reviews