Seagate NAS 4-Bay STCU300/ STCU20000U300 (20TB)

AN OLDER PRODUCT THAT NOW REPRESENTS EXCELLENT VALUE FOR PEOPLE LOOKING FOR JUST THE BASICS.

THE SEAGATE STCU300 represents a fantastic bargain right now. Sure, it’s not going to set the world on fire in terms of performance or anything else really, but if you just want a media and file server that’s capable of streaming your video collection to your smart TV or Apple TV, this gets the job done for less than $300 for a diskless version. The model we looked at came with 20GB of Seagate drives pre-installed (the only NAS reviewed here that came with drives).

The Seagate is running on an older 1.2GHz dual core ARM processor with just 512MB of memory, which is far slower than any of the old devices tested here. That’s reflected in the RAID 5 test results, where it struggled to reach 30MB/s when writing. As is usually the case with RAID 5, read speeds were a lot faster. The processor is certainly not capable of live transcoding HD video, even if that were an option in its software. It uses Seagate NAS OS, which is actually one of our favourite NAS operating systems. It’s designed for optimum simplicity with a very straightforward setup and management. The mobile apps are excellent, and we really like the anti-virus as well as the modest surveillance manager for IP camera recording and management. If you’re looking for versatility along the lines of QNAP, Asustor or Synology, however, this doesn’t have it. It’s built to do the basics and not much more, with a very limited array of third-party tools.

As a value proposition for people looking for something easy to use, this certainly has the goods. It may be a product nearing the end of its life span, but that means you may be able to pick it up for a bargain.