Considering the low power consumption (~10 W of heat?), do you think that the PSU could be used without a fan, maybe with a cover similar to the FSP Zen? I realize why I shouldn't do this with a complete product like the Mirra, just a thought if I was to build one myself. The picoPSU isn't available here.

I also have question about server PSU's in general. You've seen the packed internals of a 1U PSU. Do you think that a low speed, low noise 80 mm fan on the side of the PSU could go a good job instead of that little 40 mm screamer?

Well that's pretty underwhelming.

The cost jumped out at me...

Mirra=$380

or...

250Gb HDD: $75
Epia mini-itx all-in-one: $95
Mini-itx case: $30 (? too lazy to go find a link atm..most DIY's probably have a case and PSU laying around they could scavenge for free)
FreeNAS: $0 (or one of several similiar OS options)
Foldershare: $0
total: $200

I realize that the Mirra really isn't aimed at the kind of buyer who would consider "growing his own", but the cost markup compared to the alternative home-built system is pretty high in this case. Plus the home-built is RAID-capable, NAS-able, and more than likely, quieter.

The Mirra seems like a thrown-together collection of cheap bits..kinda odd for a big time player like Seagate. I would rather use one of their 750Gb e-SATA remote boxes with some backup software running on the main machine.

From the perspective of someone who understands small business users, the price is fine, the ease of use is fine, but everyone will notice the noise (unless the own a Presshot).

Seagate are a company who's modern vision and outlook has kept it ahead of the game in every market - bar one, the silent market, Seagate drives have been getting noisier, no wonder the PSU makes a racket, what do the designers care when the drives make so much noise.

Very interesting to know that Rusty, "FreeNAS" and "Foldershare" and you can DIY a quiter machine to do the same job for less, but it will take longer than buying one, so there will be loads of readers who will buy it and stick it well out of earshot.

Andy

You forgot the RAM there - and the board only takes SDRAM, which is getting harder and harder to find. From the looks of it, FreeNAS requires at least 96MB of RAM, so add a little bit more to it there. Granted, it's still cheaper than the Mirra, but like others have said, Seagate isn't marketing this towards the DIY-ers.

What I really don't get is Seagates choice of components -either they expect to sell less than say 10,000 of these or ??? I can't actually think of any other reason right now.

An x86 is a crap choice for a product like that, the only reason for using it would seem to be that you can buy that board off the shelf from Via. Using Debian -I don't know if MikeC checked, but I'd bet that it hasn't been extensively customised either. The whole thing just looks like what you might cobble together to demonstate the concept rather than a product. -Or maybe if you only expected to sell very few of them. The price and software features should work for the SMB maket (IMHO) but in that case I'd expect to sell far more than enough to make it worth while to do software (starting with busybox or similar) tooling for a nice case and above all to do an ARM board that would be loads cheaper than those Via things. :confused:

Couldn't agree more. The first thing I thought when saw the first pic of the Mirra cardboard box (before I've read anything) was "cheap":

Except for the Seagate logo, does this looks like a retail product from Seagate? Or does it look like product from a company (Mirra?) they've just bought? The 320 and 500 GB versions looks different or maybe it's a newer version, but I'm guessing it's just cosmetic. It still doesn't look like a Seagate.

I'm confused as to why you'd choose this over a nas enclosure or setting up something similar to rsyncwith a remote server.

It would be interesting if it were ~$150-200, with a power brick instead.

One-click software. People are willing to pay markup for not having to configure stuff themselves. This is not unlike the EPCN SPCR computers, really. (Okay, it's a bit more of a rip-off.)

Yeesh, at those prices you might as well get an Infrant ReadyNas NV+ (the best home nas on the market period) for either $600 empty, or $800-1000 with some decent drives. At least that is a full on Small 4 Hard Drive Raid5 system with full data backup and quiet operation!! (Or the other obvious choice of getting a cheap small case for a DIY Nas machine.

The Mirra existed for quite a while before it appeared with the Seagate brand so this looks like something that they bought.

A friend has had one for quite a while and the software has issues that weren't being addressed so he finally gave up on it. Hopefully, Seagate will deal with such things.

That would be me.

I have owned a Mirra unit for several years - long before Seagate bought the company. It's outer appearance is very similar to the reviewed unit.

In concept, it seems like a nice idea. But mine's as noisy as the review says. The good news is it's connected by a LAN, so you can put it far away - say in the basement. I actually thought that part was a good idea, as it removes the backup a bit from the location of the working system.

My main concerns with it as a backup product were:

1. It cannot be configured to auto-shutdown by a UPS.

2. You cannot backup a whole drive, as noted in the review.

3. It saves up to 8 versions of a file, as I recall, but can only be operated in "continuous" backup mode. Thus if you save a file a number of times in a day you quickly have no backup older than the current day. I solved this by using a software product to make a local backup daily, and having the Mirra backup from there.

4. Version 1 of the software gave no indication that connection to the sever was lost unless you open the Mirra UI.

Version 2 of the software only adressed #4 of the above list - now the tray icon on the client machine turns from red to gray when the connection is lost.

But the upgrade brought a new issue - it required the HD to be re-written totally, with loss of all existing backups. There was no provision to off-load them except for one file at a time.

Version 2 also brought frequent failures to connect to the server, and a minor upgrade caused total failure to connect. Mirria support has not provided any useful assistance. So it's now an expensive paperweight, and I use another backup system.

Neither Mirra nor now Seagate has responded to concerns about any of the above issues.

Terry