QNAP TS-859 Pro Turbo NAS review

Qnap’s new NAS appliance has Intel’s latest dual-core Atom processor at its heart. This eight-bay desktop box is packed with features and in this review we see whether it delivers in the speed stakes as well.

IT Pro Verdict

Qnap is unique as it’s the only vendor that currently offers desktop NAS appliances that support eight 3.5in. or 2.5in. drives. This gives the TS-859 Pro a price advantage over eight-bay rack mount appliances that cost around 25 per cent more. Performance is very good, it’s quiet, has plenty of business-focused features and support for IP SANs is better than most.

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We tested with an Axis 216FD camera and found it worked fine with the appliance. However, if you want more IP cameras then check out Synology's latest business NAS appliances as some of these support 16 cameras out of the box and offer equally good surveillance features.

For general performance testing we called up a Broadberry CyberServe rack server equipped with dual 2.8GHz Xeon X5560 processors, 6GB of DDR3 memory and Windows Server 2008. Qnap's own benchtests claim a top throughput of 570Mb/sec or just over 71MB/sec and for read operations we can confirm these figures.

Using drag and drop copies of a 2.52GB video clip we saw average read and write speeds over Gigabit of 76MB/sec and 60MB/sec. FTP operations were noticeably faster with the FileZilla utility reporting speeds of 105MB/sec and 72MB/sec respectively.

IP SAN performance was also on the money with the Iometer utility reporting a very respectable raw read throughput of 103MB/sec for a 50GB target. The TS-859 is easy on the power supply as well as with four drives installed we saw it pulling no more than 52W. With the drives in sleep mode this dropped to around 32W.

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We initially thought the Atom processor would have a negative impact on performance but our tests show this is far from the case. The TS-850 Pro also offers plenty of valuable storage features including good IP SAN support. If you want an eight-bay business-class desktop NAS appliance you need look no further.

Verdict

Qnap is unique as it’s the only vendor that currently offers desktop NAS appliances that support eight 3.5in. or 2.5in. drives. This gives the TS-859 Pro a price advantage over eight-bay rack mount appliances that cost around 25 per cent more. Performance is very good, it’s quiet, has plenty of business-focused features and support for IP SANs is better than most.

Chassis: Desktop CPU: 1.66GHz Intel Atom D510 Memory: 1GB DDR2 Storage: 8 x 3.5in.or 2.5in SATA hard disk hot-swap bays RAID: Software managed Array support: RAID0, 1, 5, 6, 5 + hotspare, JBOD Network: 2 x Gigabit Other ports: 4 x USB2, 2 x eSATA Power: Internal supply Management: Web browser Software: Qnap Finder, NetBak Replicator and Qget software bundled

Dave Mitchell
Dave Mitchell

Dave is an IT consultant and freelance journalist specialising in hands-on reviews of computer networking products covering all market sectors from small businesses to enterprises. Founder of Binary Testing Ltd – the UK’s premier independent network testing laboratory - Dave has over 45 years of experience in the IT industry.

Dave has produced many thousands of in-depth business networking product reviews from his lab which have been reproduced globally. Writing for ITPro and its sister title, PC Pro, he covers all areas of business IT infrastructure, including servers, storage, network security, data protection, cloud, infrastructure and services.

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