NS4600

= Smartstor NS4600 =

The Smartstor 4600 is Promise's second generation 4-bay NAS appliance. It has a compact, reasonably attractive enclosure, a low noise level, and provides a decent set of features for a reasonable price. And as you'd expect from most NAS devices around today, it runs embedded Linux.

Unlike higher-end devices from QNAP or Netgear, Promise do not provide direct access to the Linux environment, so we have to do some hacking to get that access, but once we have it, there's plenty of interesting things to do.

CPU: Intel EP80579
The heart of the NS4600 is an Intel EP80579 ("Tolapai") SoC. That means it runs the same x86 code that most PCs do. In fact, the CPU core of the SoC is a 600MHz Pentium M, which was a respectable Laptop CPU circa 2005. The SoC also provides all the essential I/O devices with the exception of the RAID controller, which is unsurprisingly a Promise part.