Patriot Javelin S4 Media Storage Server Review

By Bill Hentschell

Patriot Javelin S4 Home Media Server first impression

I have a confession to make. I have been privately looking at purchasing a NAS (Network Attached Storage) for myself for about a year but have hesitated because they seemed a bit pricey considering most do not include the hard drives. I also wanted to put it under my desk next to my dead silent water cooled rig and the thought of the drive noise plus the cooling fan(s) had me worried that it would break my serene office quite. So like a bad boyfriend I have never committed and my storage needs have severely suffered because of it.

Javelin Angle
Nate and Patriot Memory to the rescue! Nate rang me up and said “I just got this new NAS and was wondering if you had time…” I cut him off with a firm “Yes yes, I would be happy to!” Now here is where I have to trust you will not mention this part to Nate. This nice shiny box is sitting in my office waiting to be tested while I worked on a few other reviews but I just could not resist the calling of “play with me, see my fancy graphics, come on you know you want too!” So yes, I actually started using the Patriot Javelin S4 Home Media Server NAS about 10 minutes after I walked into my office and before I was finished with my other review. In fact it was so amazingly easy to use with a depth of features I could never fully utilize that I couldn’t stop playing with it and it might have slightly delayed finishing my last review. Remember this is just between us so do not tell Nate. Now that I have that off my chest it is finally time to justify my playing and review this bad boy.

Most of you are aware of Patriot Memory since they have been designing and manufacturing high performance enthusiast grade memory since 1985. But like other memory manufacturers they have started to move in to adjacent markets such as SSD’s and even into peripherals such as memory cooling fans, USB 3.0 cards, and in the case of Patriot Memory, NAS media storage devices.

The Patriot Javelin S4 Home Media Server (P/N: PCNASJV35S4) is a four drive NAS Media Server that can deliver up to an enormous 12TB of storage (4x 3TB drives) which is the equivalent of 3 Million songs, or 3.4 Million photos, or 912,000 hours of videos which is 38,000 days worth. All of this storage potential just plugs right in to your GIG Ethernet network to be accessed from anywhere. And if up to 12TB is not enough space for you, the Patriot Javelin S4 has both eSATA and dual USB 2.0 connectors on the back to extend your storage even further. If you plug a thumb drive into one of the USB ports, the Javelin will automatically share that on the network as well. Bonus feature, plug a USB printer into one of the ports on the back of the Javelin and it will turn that into a shared network printer. The features just keep going with this unit.

Javelin with HDD
The primary feature of any RAID based NAS is some level of data fault tolerance and the Patriot Javelin S4 covers this with just about every modern RAID feature you can provide across four drives. The Javelin S4 starts by supporting RAID levels 0, 1, 5, and 10 (1+0). It also supports RAID migration to expand any RAID set you have created on the fly to a different RAID level and size simply by adding additional hard drive(s). To increase the resilience of your RAID array you can designate one of your installed drives as a “spare drive” which tells the Javelin S4 to allow it to sit idle and if one of the other drives in your RAID array fails the Javelin S4 will automatically use this spare drive to rebuild the RAID array with zero down time and all files fully accessible. If you do need to add a new drive either for expansion or due to drive failure the Javelin S4 has full hot swap support and will automatically mount the drive and begin to rebuild your array on the new drive if a drive has failed. The Javelin also has built in support for snap shot back ups on box, off box backups to another Javelin S4, and even supports APC UPS’s for soft shut down upon power failure.

Why did Patriot name the Javelin S4 a home media server instead of simply calling it a NAS device? Simple, it has just about every possible media handling and connectivity solution you could ask for and some you might not have even considered. The Javelin S4 has a full music server streaming solution including the ability to create custom play lists and stream music to Windows Media Center, iTunes, a web browser, or an Android / iPhone App. There is a photo gallery solution that can even create a full photo album with an HTML file to show the photo’s in one of many ways (lightbox, mooslider, etc). You simply can e-mail the folder to your friends and family to see all the images and have them presented in a great show. Video is covered from the media server and you can stream multiple 1080p streams to any device that is DLNA Certified or UPnP compatible such as an Xbox 360 in addition to your iPad, laptop, or any other device connected to the network.

Javelin Angle

Patriot Memory Javelin S4 Home Media Server Features and Specifications:

  • Support up to 4 Hot Swappable 3.5″ SATA II Hard Drives
  • RJ-45 10/100/1000 Network Port
  • 1x eSATA and 2x USB 2.0 ports
  • Print server capable for USB Printers
  • iTunes server capable
  • Logitech Squeezebox Server capable (plug-in download required)
  • TimeMachine compatible
  • Integrated BitTorrent client
  • UPnP compatible
  • DLNA 1.5 Certified Digital Media Server
  • Web based in-browser playback (access from any PC or Mac)
  • Facebook Upload
  • Mobile media playback (Android/iOS Free APP)
  • Multiple user management
  • One Touch Backup
  • RAID 1, 0, 1+0 (10), 5
  • Full feature back up utility software (Acronis)
  • Applied Micro PowerPC 431EXr @ 800MHz
  • 256MB DRAM
  • OS: BusyBox Unix
  • File System: XFS
  • iSCSI Target support
  • Web File Management Center
  • Web based Download Center
  • Schedule external drive backup/restore
  • Power saving features such as inactivity HDD power down
  • APC UPS support for soft shutdown
  • Both Web 2.0/Ajax Management and Client Management Utility
  • Supported Protocols: AFP/CIFS/SMB/NFS/DLNA/UPnP/Bonjour
  • Supported Operating Systems: Windows, Mac OS X, Linux
  • Supports Microsoft ADS; User, Group, and Quota management
  • NAS to NAS Replication
  • Snapshot Backup with Export and Restore
  • Wake On LAN; On/Off Scheduling; LED On/Off Scheduling
  • Support Bit-torrent, emule, HTTP and FTP download
  • MySQL and Web Server (WEBDAV)
  • Event Logging and Email Notification

The Patriot Javelin S4 only comes only in white and we found it for $336.31 shipped without hard drives. Patriot provides a 2 year warranty which is about a year longer than most NAS manufacturers in this SOHO space.

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