| QNAP TS-409 Turbo NAS Storage |
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QNAP introduces an easy to setup NAS (Network Attached Storage) that's ideal for any SOHO or Home user INTRODUCTION QNAP Systems, INC. (QNAP) is a Taiwanese based company that specialise in network storage and surveillance solutions. Over the past few years, they've established themselves as one of the fastest growing providers in the field of network storage. Here's a little blurb taken from their website. "QNAP Systems, INC. (QNAP) is a devoted and dominant provider of Internet Appliance products. With our solid and integrated expertise in the Linux embedded platform, QNAP has released more than 30 models for the network storage and digital network surveillance series over the past 6 years, providing our consumers with high performance and high reliability storage, backup, and surveillance solutions. Today, QNAP continues to lead the industry with our innovation in design and technology. Our products have gained worldwide recognition."
So what is a NAS? Well, NAS is the acronym for Network Attached Storage. It's essentially a self-contained computer connected to a network, with the sole purpose of supplying data storage services to other devices on the network. The unit is not designed to carry out general-purpose computing tasks, however most NAS do have other functionality other than just data storage.
QNAP has two models in the TS-409 series ... the standard verison and the PRO version. The standard version supports Windows and Macs, while the PRO version has added support for NFS for Linux clients and AD authentication as well. In this review, we take a look at the QNAP TS-409 Turbo NAS (standard version). It's a complete backup and storage solution that has 4 hot swappable drive bays, a built-in 500Mhz processor, 256MB DDR2 ram for cache, and it's compatibile with SATA hard drives, which are very affordable. The unit supports a wide range of standards including RAID 0/1/5/6/JBOD, and has a unique USB auto-copy button, which is perfect for quick backup of USB storage devices such as USB pen/thumb drives.
The unit is nicely presented and comes all the necessary cables, power adaptor and instruction manuals. There are several pieces of software on the installation CD. These include QFinder, NetBak Replicator and QGet ... but the main menu for configuration is done through a web-based GUI. This can be accessed via youer web browser of your choice. The QNAP TS-409 supports striping, mirroring, RAID-5 and RAID-6. The most costly option is RAID-6, with a minimum of four drives required to function and can survive the loss of two drives, but gives you limited storage space. RAID-5 would be the best option for most SOHO users as this gives the best performance, capacity and data integrity.
To test the QNAP TS-409, we used 4 hard drives and configured it under RAID-5 with 1 hot spare. We'll also test how easy it is to use the web-based menu for hassle-free configuration and quick, easy access. Will the unit handle large files and large data transfer? And what about the built-in FTP server and Bit Torrent service ... OK, let's not waste any more time and take a closer look at the QNAP TS-409 Turbo NAS.
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