QNap TS-879 Pro TurboNAS review

QNap's latest desktop NAS box is its first to use a Core i3 processor and along with SATA3 disk support, it's 10-Gigabit Ethernet ready and packed with storage features. Read this review to see why Dave Mitchell thinks this is the desktop appliance to beat.

IT Pro Verdict

The TS-879 Pro delivers a range of storage features that the competition will be hard pressed to match let alone beat. These include free cloud services and some quality IP SAN capabilities, plus it’s impressively fast over both Gigabit and 10-Gigabit Ethernet networks. The only thing missing is the ability to add expansion units, but its maximum capacity of 24TB using the latest SATA3 hard disks should be quite sufficient for most SMBs.

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The 10GbE card was identified without any problems and both ports appeared in the Network section ready for configuration. As with the Gigabit Ethernet ports, they support Jumbo frames and can be teamed together for fault tolerant or load balanced links.

The appliance can be upgraded easily to 10-Gigabit and we had no problems using an Emulex dual-port 10GBase-SR card.

The appliance can be upgraded easily to 10-Gigabit and we had no problems using an Emulex dual-port 10GBase-SR card.

The appliance can be upgraded easily to 10-Gigabit and we had no problems using an Emulex dual-port 10GBase-SR card.

We dived straight into performance testing over Gigabit Ethernet using a Broadberry dual X5560 rack server running Windows Server 2008 R2. Iometer reported a fast read speed of 110MB/s for a mapped Windows share whilst drag and drop copies of a 2.52GB video clip returned read and write speeds of 104MB/s. Using the FileZilla client to FTP the video clip also returned the same speeds.

For 10GbE testing we used a dual Opteron 4170 HE Dell PowerEdge R515 server fitted with an Emulex dual-port 10GBase-SR card and all configured for Jumbo frames. With a direct fibre connection to the appliance we saw Iometer return a storming raw read speed of 586MB/s for a mapped share.

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This translated to a big boost for drag and drop copies with the same tests now returning average read and write speeds of over 300MB/s. Most businesses will connect the appliance to a switch over 10GbE and use it to link multiple servers over Gigabit Ethernet and the TS-879 Pro looks quite capable of handling these demands.

IP SAN performance is also excellent with a 100GB target delivering a raw read speed of 111MB/s over Gigabit Ethernet with the file copies returning similar rates. Moving over to a 10GbE connection saw Iometer report a read speed of 627MB/s for the same target with copy speeds of up to 575MB/s.

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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