One thing I've learned from working in IT is that it's not a question of if something will fail, but when. With storage, this usually means a failed hard drive with little to no down time. However, disasters like floods and fires do happen and, even with a cloud-based backup, it can take days, or even weeks, to restore your data and bring your business back online.
With the ioSafe 1019+, businesses and consumers can sleep a little better at night knowing that their data is safe from disasters. In addition to a thick, metal enclosure, this 5-bay NAS uses patented technologies like DataCast and HydroSafe to protect its hard drives from fires up to 1550ยบ F as well as being submerged in water up to 10 feet deep. Needless to say, the 1019+ is rugged enough to protect your data during your average office (or house) fire along with the dousing it will get when the fire department comes to put it out. When it's all over, you can take the hard drives out, pop them into another ioSafe (or Synology) NAS and be back up and running in no time.
While the ioSafe 1019+'s biggest selling point is its ability to protect your data from fire and water, its NAS functionality is also quite good. Powered by Synology's DiskStation Manager operating system and equipped with a quad-core Intel Celeron processor, 8GB of DDR3L RAM and a pair of Gigabit Ethernet ports, this 5-bay NAS delivers great performance as well as a multitude of features for modern business environments. In addition to its easy to use web interface, the 1019+ offers centralized, cross platform storage and backups, cloud synchronization, multimedia streaming, SSD caching and remote access via Synology's QuickConnect service.
As you can imagine, all this doesn't come cheap. The diskless version of the ioSafe 1019+ has a suggest retail price of $2,399, which is almost four times the price of the Synology DS1019+. A unit equipped with five 4TB drives, like the one in this review, will set you back nearly $4,300. This is a sizeable investment, especially for small businesses and consumers. However, when you consider what you'd lose in productivity, as well as the cost it would take to recover your data from a damaged hard drive, it's probably worth it.
Highs:
- Fire- and water-proof design
- Powered by 64-bit dual-core 1.4 GHz processor
- Five 3.5-inch drive bays
- Supports SHR, RAID 0, 1, 5, 6, 10, JBOD and basic disk configurations
- Cross-platform file sharing and synchronization
- Provides data backups for clients, servers and virtual machines
- Dual Gigabit Ethernet ports
- Two M.2 NVMe slots for SSD caching
- USB 3.0 and eSATA expansion ports
- Easy to use web interface
- Remotely accessible from web browsers and mobile devices
- Backup and synchronize data to public clouds
- Multimedia streaming
- Data Recovery Service available
Lows:
- Pricey
- Large and heavy
- Only a two year warranty (can be extended to five with DRS coverage)
