One new design change in the N2 is the ability to open the unit and actually gain access to the bare drives. This is done via a provided Allen wrench tool and is very straight forward. With this, you can add your own drives into the chassis and have semi-easy access to them. Past units were completely sealed with no way to access the drives.
Another improvement is the ability to install more than one drive and set up RAID arrays for redundancy. The N2 unit featured in this review came with two 1TB drives pre-installed and retails for around $900. Other options include no disks (you install your own) starting at $600 to a monster 8TB unit that comes in around $2000. All of these prices include one year of warranty on the equipment and one year of the data recovery service.
It should be noted that the diskless model does not include the DRS service. You can also opt to extend the warranty and DRS to three years or five years for a nominal fee relative to the value of the model being purchased.
Based on these prices, some jaws may be on the floor right about now. Compared to standard external hard drives and NAS devices, this is a pretty high price but it is also important to keep in mind this is no ordinary storage device. Continue ahead as we take a closer look at ioSafe's N2 offering.
