Introduction

We all know Seagate's consumer and enterprise products, but Seagate also has a growing list of end user storage products. For the last couple of years we've pretty much ignored these consumer and entry level enterprise products, since we tend to focus on raw hard drives; but that is about to change.

Today we are looking at Seagate's BlackArmor 400 Series of network storage products. On paper the BlackArmor 400, 420 and 440 look like solid contenders to the Thecus and QNAP NAS servers we write about on a regular basis. The one area on paper that has us excited is pricing; the BlackArmor 400 Series has a total cost that is less than what the two giants in the NAS server market deliver.

Being our first review of the Seagate BlackArmor, we will be putting the 420 model through the ringer testing not only the products data transfer performance, but also take a look at the software and user interface. There's a lot to talk about, so let's just jump right in and get started.