More than just bigger storage. The 650 steps up to RAID-6 and adds ECC memory, neither of which the 450 includes, along with a second Gigabit port and enough capacity for around 1,200 mailboxes instead of 600. It's the point in the lineup where the hardware itself is built for heavier, around-the-clock archiving, not just more of it.

RAID-1 mirrors two drives and can survive one drive failing. RAID-6 stripes data with double parity across more drives, so it can survive two drive failures at the same time. On an appliance holding 8 TB of mail for 1,200 people, that extra margin matters, since a second failure during a rebuild is exactly when data loss happens.

ECC, short for error-correcting code memory, catches and fixes small memory errors on the fly instead of letting them silently corrupt data as it's processed. On an appliance indexing and searching years of archived mail, that's what keeps a rare memory glitch from turning into a corrupted archive or a bad search result.

You get the choice of how to use them. Most IT teams put mail journaling traffic on one port and admin or management access on the other, keeping day-to-day archiving separate from the network you use to log in and manage the appliance.

Yes. Every Message Archiver, including the 650, is licensed as a flat cost per appliance rather than per user. You get the full feature set out of the box, with no per-seat charges as you add mailboxes up to the recommended 1,200.