Patriot Valkyrie NAS Review - PAGE 7

As a whole, Patriot marks some excellent points with the Valkyrie. First of all, lets put a price on this NAS. Patriot is targeting $140 after mail-in-rebate, which translates to a retail price of $160. The good news is that it's already available for slightly cheaper than that at the egg. This makes it the cheapest NAS of its class by a more than fair margin.

Where did they cut costs? Apparently not on build quality. Even without any installed hard drives, it's surprisingly heavy and the mostly metal enclosure has a durable feel to it. The limited use of plastic certainly has something to do with it too. The small 40mm fan at the back is relatively quiet, but definitely noticeable in a low noise environment and did a questionable job at keep the drives cool. They don't get scorching hot, but using low power drives would be a wise choice to minimize not only heat, but also power consumption.

With two drives installed, it idles at about 17W and barely climbed to 20W while copying files. Why such a small jump? The processor consumes very little power, but it's so slow the drives are basically idling. Which brings me to the Valkyrie's primary weakness: performance.

Of course, they need to cut corners somewhere to meet that price point and that's where they did. The cheap, low power, embedded Marvell processor simply can't handle much more than a 100 Mbps network connection. However, similarly priced NAS' are also affected by that same problem so while I would really have liked to see it perform better, at least it's not significantly worse than the competition. At about 10 MB/s, transferring a many-gigabyte file to or from the NAS was about 7 times slower than copying files from a computer to another.

While the Valkyrie can handle RAID0, there's really no point to using that as it would be putting data at risk without any performance advantage. There's also JBOD. This one basically merges drives into a single volume, which is more or less useful on such a device. If you have identical drives, the sensible choice really is RAID1 -- it duplicates data over both drives so if one fails, you don't lose anything. Otherwise, you might as well run treat the two drives as two separate entities.

The Valkyrie's appeal comes in its vast array of features. With FTP, DDNS, iTunes server, UPnP, BitTorrent and even a print server, it's a very flexible device. In fact, the Valkyrie is much more than simply network storage with FTP access, but I did run into a few snags. First of all, the DDNS didn't call home to update itself so whenever my external IP address changes, I have to manually log in to my DynDNS.org account. Manageable when you're at home, but if you're out, it's too bad but you're not getting any access to the NAS. Secondly, we are still working on this one, but we never got UPnP to work on my end. It apparently works, but for some reason mine does not.

Other than that, FTP worked as expected, the unit was able to download large torrents without issues and the print server is a really neat addition too. Then comes the media streaming part which is really cool. It was quite satisfying to watch the Valkyrie simultaneously stream two 1080p movies, a DVD movie and music flawlessly over four different computers. Patriot may not have the fastest chips on board, but thanks to bandwidth efficient codecs, media streaming is a walk in the park for the device. I had been eying one of these media players for a while, but this NAS does that and so much more. There are pros and cons to both solutions and while I have no doubt lots of people prefer the cleaner and simpler players, I certainly enjoy the flexibility this NAS provides.

Overall, the Patriot Valkyrie NAS is a great entry level unit -- affordable, well built and packed with higher than entry-level features. The unit has a few minor annoyances, including the non-stop blinking red light when no drive is installed, the scheduled restart should delay itself if there is network activity and it only supports FAT32 and Ext2. However, a firmware update is supposed to be released in the coming weeks, which will bring support for Ext3 and possibly improved performance among other fixes. Once Patriot works out the Valkyrie's few rough edges, it'll be hard to resist the attractive $140 price tag. While it's certainly not anything near fast, if you're looking for an affordable, flexible, centralized data storage solution for your home, look no further!