Zyxel NSA-221

The Zyxel NSA221 is a twin-bay NAS that isn't supplied with hard drives. It does, however, have several innovative multimedia functions, such as a smart drag and drop tool that automatically sorts music, video and photo files copied onto the NAS into the relevant folders. It sounds great, but let's see how this NAS really shapes up.

First of all, let's take a quick look at the product's design. The Zyxel NSA221 looks like a typical two-bay NAS, with a compact design that's not much bigger than the two 3.5-inch drives it's designed to house. Note that it doesn't come with an adapter for 2.5-inch drives.

Connections are fairly limited, with just one Gigabit Ethernet port and three USB 2.0 ports, one of which is on the front panel. The external power transformer is a small, discreet block and there's a button on the front of the NAS to sync files or make copies of folders as and when required.

Once we'd installed our two WD VelociRaptor hard drives, the built-in software automatically configured the NAS in relation to the options we selected. Our tests were carried out with the drives in RAID 1 mode for safe data back-up, but the NSA221 also has RAID 0 and JBOD modes. Once set-up is complete, the software becomes pretty much redundant, although you may still need it now and again (particular custom settings, automatic file sorting etc.). More on that later in the review.

In spite of its Gigabit Ethernet connection, the NSA221 doesn't have particularly impressive performances:

Transfer speeds via Gigabit Ethernet connection with two WD VelociRaptor HDDs

Data transfer speeds are barely faster than those you'd typically see with a standard 100 Mbps network port. In fact, the NSA221 is a long way off getting the best out of its Gigabit connection and lags far behind competitors' models, many of which can easily reach between 40 and 60 MBps in read mode and 20 to 40 MBps in write mode.

Read and write speeds to or from an HDD connected to one of the USB ports aren't much better either, with top speeds of 7.2 MBps in read mode and 2 MBps in write mode. These speeds are, on average, five times slower than those seen in NAS that handle the USB 2.0 connection effectively.

Zyxel is keen to promote the multimedia functions of its NSA221 NAS. For example, Z-import software automatically sorts files copied to the NAS. Simply install the software on your PC, then drag and drop the files you want to copy into the Z-import window. The software will then automatically identify music, video and photo files and copy them into their respective folders on the NAS.

Other functions include an online multimedia player for watching videos, viewing photos or listening to music directly via a web browser. Although we couldn't get the video playback function to work very well, the system worked fine with photos and music.
 

The file navigation system in the web-based interface isn't particularly practical and doesn't really stand out from other NAS on the market. Worse still, http file transfers are interminably slow, and we wouldn't recommend you use this system to copy files onto the NAS—you're better of sticking to SMB or FTP. At the moment, only Synology has a decent web-based file navigation system thanks to the DSM 3.0 firmware supplied with all of its NAS.

While we're on the subject of multimedia, note that sharing and integrating content into Windows Media Player is automatic and requires no user set-up. WMP displays all the different media libraries (music, photo, video) straight away for fast, convenient access to your favourite files.