Qnap Ts-439 Review

Transcript

QNAP TS-439 Review Hi-Jack A series of three reviews is about to go unleashed by MPC concerning the new QNAP NAS solutions that provide a solution for low, medium and high capacity needs. The news TS series sure look appealing and are fitted with power under the hood. We’ll look at these one by one and try to present you with an idea of what you are buying… MPC CLub [email protected] www.mpcclub.com General Intro The QNAP TS-439 Pro It’s quite amazing how fast new models of QNAP follow each other but that’s likely due to the demand and growth of the HD file storage scene. We seek more performance and bigger capacity, nicer designs, easier interfaces for home use yet want all the features incorporated. We’d like it to be a “pro” device. The QNAP TS439 Pro has the same style as the other versions following the design enhancements we previously seen with the competition although it does a better job at looking more modern. With the latest series of QNAP, all these requirements are met if we believe the specifications and the looks of the units. These units belong to the most powerful units in their category and look nice on top. What we look forward to is exploring three new devices outside and inside, and then rule about the price being in balance with what is offered. We seek to be blown off our feet by QNAP’s new systems… First we’d like to express our gratitude towards QNAP for providing the units in cooperation with the NL Distributor www.wifimedia.eu . There are two eSATA connections available, 4 USB ports to which you can connect external hard drives or a printer and 2 GBIT network connections that allow connecting theTS-439 Pro to two separate networks or one can opt for using load balancing or failover. Unpacking the device reveals the unit and power cord, 2 network cables, 16 screws for the hard drives, 2 keys to lock the hard drives in place, a CDROM with the necessary applications to discover the unit and a quick start guide. In this review, we will review all three new QNAP models launched early 2009 and give you an independent opinion on how we experience these NAS servers from unpacking the box to testing their performance… We start in the middle with the TS639 Pro followed by the TS-439. Last item we review is the new flagship of QNAP, the TS-809 which can hold 8 hard drives and is powered by the massive 2.4Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo processor. is these are all silent and smart fans that adjust itself to the unit’s use although it is audible. The VGA output is not for home use. There is a reset button and a Kensington lock provided in the rear. The front looks nice and has everything you wish for. A small LCD panel that delivers quick basic information but can also be used to quickly setup the NAS using a single button, network, USB, status, HDD and power led, a quick backup button and a power button. Good thing is where none of the led for the hard drives or other indicators shines too bright. The rear end might scare you a little seeing the huge fan integrated and a second one dedicated for cooling the PSU. That’s quite some cooling going on for the hard drives and internal main board. The good news however As you can see, the options in the rear are exactly as with the TS-639 PRO but different from the TS-809 which dropped both the eSATA ports. Warning: As with all NAS servers, not all drives can be used. Manufacturers go through a lot of testing to provide lists of compatible hard drives. Please check this list before ordering any NAS from QNAP to ensure you pick the correct hard drives for your unit. http://www.qnap.com/pro_compatibility.asp For our unit, we selected the 1.5TB hard drives, model Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 model ST31500341AS. Our thanks go out to www.divxplayer.nl for providing 10 of these hard drives for our testing purposes. Now the courtesies have been taken care of and introduction of the QNAP TS-439 PRO is completed, we can start setting up the unit and explore it’s abilities. Let’s get it on already and see what we find under the hood… The led system in front offers problem indication using colors which are explained in the manual backed up by a “beep” system to indicate what the unit is doing (Power on ready, shutdown, volume warnings etc…) Now we will start setting up the unit and see how easy that is using the display… Specifications TS-439 Pro Setup QNAP TS-439 Pro The QNAP TS-439 Pro is powered by a 1.6GHz Intel Atom processor and 1GB DDRII memory. This should suffice for the general user although QNAP is one of the brands you can easily upgrade the memory off but this voids warranty. Again, the specs are the same as with the bigger TS-639 PRO and I wonder if the only difference will actually be the available drive bays? I can’t say I’m surprised about the ease of use as I have been only so lucky to see the LCD setup on the QNAP TS-509 before. The same options on the TS-439 provide an easy way to setup the unit without using the PC. For our testing, we leave the default amount of memory in place. As stated, it can hold 4 hard drives, has iSCSI support integrated and supports volume based encryption to keep your data safe. RAID configurations supported include RAID0, 1 and 5. In RAID 5 you can assign a drive as hot spare and if you rather not have any RAID configured, there’s JBOD. A little extra on the fans, these are “ultra silent” so the most noise in operation will come from the rattling hard drives inside. From 2 meters away from the unit, I have trouble hearing the fans operate unless the room is silent. I would say ultra silent is still somewhat different but the noise is acceptable. When all disks are connected, one simply powers on the unit and once ready, the display will guide you in 3 steps to start the installation. First we select the RAID configuration where the QNAP proposes the best configuration based on the amount of disks that are loaded. Next we chose not to encrypt the volume (AES 256bit Volume Based Encryption) and off we go, the unit is already building… Here’s what’s unbelievable… After 1 hour the unit is ready and sits there waiting for me to continue while syncing the RAID in the bacground… That’s extremely fast. Admin interface At this time one can use the CD-ROM and software provided by QNAP to find the NAS and administer the unit however we go directly by the browser as the IP assigned to the unit is shown on the display. No need to go search for anything or install software just to find the unit. You can read the manual on the software provided for this purpose. We connect to the admin panel using the default user and password provided by QNAP (admin/admin) which allows us to configure the device using a simple wizard or advanced control panel. Hard boiled as we are, we use the advanced mode since that offers a lot more options than the wizard will provide. Configuration TS-439 Pro The online administrative panel is still the same as we know from the earlier models by QNAP. You can login to any of the applications or logon to the admin control panel in order to make changes to the system. The items shown on the main page can be selected from the admin control panel for direct access. The configuration is done in the same categories as before ranging from system settings to reviewing system logs. We will run by them quickly as we discussed these in details already… Quick Configuration The Quick configuration allows us to quickly set the most important settings on the system in 6 different steps. Enter Change password. the server the name. Once all changes are selected, you can apply these to the unit. A progress indicator shows the status. administrator Enter the date, time and time zone for this server. Enter the IP address, subnet mask and default gateway for this server. Select the services to be enabled. Services available are quite numerous and most are available by default. Additional packages can be installed (called QPKG packages) that offer additional options like Joomla, PHPMyAdmin, Usenet and then some more… Default services include Microsoft Networking (SAMBA), Apple networking, NFS, a web file manager, FTP, torrent/HTTP/FTP download station, multimedia station, UPnP server, iTuunes server, web server and finally MySQL Server. In addition to these, there is also a surveillance station integrated allowing to use the NAS as a video surveillance system. General configuration options Select disk configuration (In case you have not set it yet using the display as we did). Without going over all the options seperately, the most wanted features of a PRO NAS include Telnet, SSH, scheduling options for both the NAS and torrent downloads. All of these are available and well tuned to be usefull and easy to us. The dual network enabling connecting the device to two separate lan and use it in failover and teaming (load balancing) is brilliant. Combine that with the RAID6 and RAID5 with hot spare option and all features of a PRO NAS are here including remote login over telnet and SSH. I can hear some people hope we mention something about using Jumbo Frames… well… it does support it with an MTU value of 4057, 7418 and 9000 bytes. For a more detailed overview of the options on the QNAP and how these work, allow me to guide you to our TS-509 Pro review which offers the detailed explanation of most functions. These have not changed that much where the TS-439 is mainly a power injection into the 4-bay series offering few services extra as default that previously had to be installed additionally. QNAP kept all the features we loved so much including wake on lan, NSYNC remote replication and iSCSI allowing PC’s to us the NAS as a target drive without the generic drive mapping. Performance TS-439 MPC TIP: We initially used the Seagate 1.5TB drives resulting in absolute horrible performance in these new series of QNAP. We strongly recommend avoid using these drives. (Seagate model ST31500341AS). Tests are now based on the Seagate RAID drives ES2 model ST31000340AS. NAS solutions. The TS-439 will consume about 30W in standby and between 35 / 40 W when operating (including 4 drives loaded). We used the ATTO Benchmark to connect the QNAP TS-439 to our VISTA PC and measured the performance over a GBIT network with quite satisfying results. Using an Intel Dual Core T9600 (Centrino2) 2.8GHz and 4GB RAM. Extras QNAP’s QPKG system allows adding extra applications and new additions have recently being made including an AJAX file handler which improves the default integrated file explorer. Most valuable packages remain the Sueezecenter 7 allowing the use of music systems like Logitech DUET and Squeezebox. Web developers will be happy finding phpMyAdmin, Joomla and Wordpress, developers will like the IPKG solutions and those downloading from the net will be happy with ML Donkey and SABnzbd+… The average write speed measured reached about 45 - 50MB/s while the read speed average doubled the performance and capped at 110MB/s. Notice these results are based on “standard” tests which consumers can expect at home being on a GBIT network. We did not tweak anything to get best “theoretical” results and different results can be achieved by your PC performance abilities. Power Consumption Being green helps a lot these days selling products and QNAP is still amongst the “least” consuming devices where it concerns powerful Conclusion The QNAP TS-439 is a top device which makes a great addition in any environment, be it home users for media storage or any other purpose in home and business use. It is stashed full off goodies, more than anyone possibly needs and allows adding a lot more applications. No doubt QNAP is gaining ground over the competition since their TS509 made a great impression on reviewers and these new models will continue gaining ground as they equally impress although we consider them a little too costly starting at €679 for the barebones… For that, you get a whopping 1.6GHz Atom processor and 1GB DDRII memory default in a nicely designed case that produces low noise. The difference between the TS-639 PRO and this TS439 PRO is ability to add 2 more drives and use RAID6. At the first glance, there not seem to be any software differences so the difference in price for 2 additional drives is quite big. (Compare QNAP devices) Despite the great impression again, QNAP not always took comments from previous reviews at heart as some software enhancements have not been fulfilled yet which lead to more convenience for the average users like allowing saving user and passwords on the download application for use with Rapidshare and FTP sites. Hardware wise, these new models, including this TS-439 are amongst the best build servers so far from QNAP. Setup and general use is easy so any consumer should easily find their way with the TS-439. Performance wise, the results are ok. Around 50MB/s write speed in our average tests and over 100 MB/s read performance. As with the TS-639 PRO we found the unit sometimes making a humming noise. To sum it all up, the QNAP TS-439 is truly an amazing all-in-one device offering a solution to just about any custom situation combining a perfect balance in easy to use features, advanced options and modular expansion of software ranging from generic media use to a download staging and even surveillance.... The TS-439 is the next best thing following the TS509 which we still see as a great NAS server solution and should not be crossed of your list just yet. The TS-439 brings a better design but offers the same abilities and that does not truly justify the low difference in price with the TS-509. I remain hungry for some new interface being implemented that is more intuitive but want to make sure it’s understood the existing one is fine too, be it somewhat less appealing. The TS-439 earns our “Editor’s Choice” award as truly this is an impressive device we absolutely recommend as your home server and not making it any weaker than the TS639 was a good choice although you can feel that in the price being charged which is €150 above our max recommended 4-bay NAS price. For detailed specifications please visit the QNAP product web site http://www.qnap.com/pro_detail_har dware.asp?p_id=110 Information on the software side of the QNAP TS-439, in our QNAP TS509 review which reflects pretty much the same software abilities as the TS-439. Notice in Q2 QNAP intends to release a new interface based on AJAX. See the other QNAP reviews of this new series which do contain some additional information scattered over the three reviews. How else do we make you read all three? Enjoy Hi-Jack