If you're looking for the most storage capacity you can get for your money, the Aberdeen AberNAS 211 is for you. It has double the capacity of the other products and doesn't cost much more. Powered by a Pentium 4 processor (as are all four products), the rack-mountable 211 provides enough horsepower to handle just about any task a small or medium-size business can throw at it—though it's not a speed demon with light client loads.

All RAID functions are managed by a 3ware 8-port serial ATA RAID controller. In addition to the eight hot-swappable hard drives, the 211 comes with two 80GB Seagate internal hard drives that hold the server OS. The OS drives were set up with two mirrored 8GB partitions to provide fail-over for the operating system.

When we opened the heavy, metal chassis, we were impressed by the manufacturing quality and attention to detail. All cabling is neatly bundled, and seven fans share the task of dissipating heat.

The underlying OS that manages storage volumes, users, and hardware is Windows Storage Server 2003. After logging on to the HTML interface, administrators can follow a few simple directions to set up and configure the server name, IP address, administrative account, e-mail address for alert messaging, time and date, and more.

As with user and group management, drive management is also configurable through a Web interface. If you want more detailed control or need to rebuild your RAID, you can use 3ware's Web-based configuration tool. For other advanced configuration tasks, you can access the server via Terminal Services.

A wealth of system status, health information, and traffic and usage statistics is available on the 211—a benefit of Storage Server 2003. This cannot be said for comparably priced Linux-based NAS devices, which require third-party software.

While we can't explain its relatively poor performance with light client loads, it does perform very well with heavier loads. The 211 won't disappoint businesses in need of lots of storage capacity at a very good price.