Qnap TS-h1077AFU review: A great all-Flash performance for small spaces

Qnap offers an impressive range of enterprise all-Flash NAS appliances, and its TS-h1090FU turned heads when it was launched, as it delivers an impressive and very powerful package in a compact 1U rack chassis. A near-£9K starter price tag won't endear it to SMBs, though, and we review the new TS-h1077AFU, which aims to offer budget-conscious businesses a more affordable all-Flash alternative.

It employs the same short-depth chassis equipped with ten SFF front hot-swap bays, but similarities are only skin deep, as there are a lot of internal changes designed to make the price more palatable. The TS-h1077AFU only supports SATA SFF SSDs and not U.2 NVMe SSDs, and the dual embedded 25GbE ports in the TS-h1090FU have been replaced with 10GbE ports.

It's all change in the processing department as the TS-1077AFU receives an 8-core 3.8GHz AMD Ryzen 7 7700 CPU with embedded AMD Radeon Graphics. Another advantage of the Ryzen CPU is it supports fast DDR5 memory with the price including 32GB upgradeable to a very usable 192GB.

Qnap TS-h1077AFU review: Build quality

The TS-h1077AFU is clothed in the same solid steel chassis as the TS-h1090FU so gets equal praise from us for its build quality. The carriers are the metal tool-free variety and we had no problems fitting SSDs as they are pressed down until they click into place.

The appliance presents a spacious interior with easy access to all components and the Ryzen CPU has a chunky passive heatsink with four DIMM slots to one side. The base 32GB of DDR5 is supplied on one stick allowing memory to be increased to 128GB without having to replace it.

The appliance offers two PCIe Gen4 expansion slots presented on riser cards but we found adapter installation a bit fiddly as each riser must be removed completely before fitting a card. However, if the embedded ports aren't enough, the appliance supports a wide range of Qnap's 10GbE and 25GbE cards.

The comparatively low capacities of SATA SSDs don't make the TS-1077AFU a great choice as a backup vault but you can improve its storage prospects massively by fitting Qnap's SAS3 expansion cards. The appliance supports up to eight JBODs allowing capacity to scale up to 5PB but check system memory requirements as this will probably need upgrading.

Qnap TS-h1077AFU review: Great 10GbE performance

For our 10GbE lab performance tests, we fitted five 1TB Western Digital Red SA500 SATA SSDs and created a single RAID5 array. With a NAS share mapped to a Dell PowerEdge Windows Server 2025 host, we recorded 9.3Gbits/sec and 9.1Gbits/sec for sequential reads and writes with the same results returned for random operations.

IP SAN speeds over 10GbE are just as good with a 500GB iSCSI target returning the same Iometer sequential and random speeds as the NAS share. We ramped up the pressure with a dual 10GbE MPIO link to the target and saw great sequential read and write rates of 18.1Gbits/sec and 18.3Gbits/sec while random operations delivered 18.3Gbits/sec and 17.7Gbits/sec

Swapping to 4K block sizes delivered solid I/O throughputs for the MPIO iSCSI link with Iometer reporting 200,000 and 221,500 IOPS for sequential reads and writes and 200,500 and 149,500 IOPS for random operations. Our random write IOPS test pushed the Ryzen CPU to around 74% utilisation but it never strayed above 17% with all other tests.

Qnap TS-h1077AFU review: QuTS Hero features

The 'h' in its name indicates that QuTS Hero is the preferred operating system for the TS-h1077AFU and for good reason, as it offers superior data protection features to Qnap's more nimble QTS. These include ZFS copy-on-write, end-to-end checksums that handle self-healing of data corruption, and near-unlimited NAS and iSCSI LUN snapshots.

It provides space-saving data compression, and the base memory enables inline deduplication, which requires a minimum of 16GB. Ransomware protection is present with a choice of two WORM (write once, read many) policies that can be applied during NAS share creation.

Backup services are in abundance with the Hybrid Backup Sync (HBS) 3 app managing 3-2-1 protection strategies and securing local appliance data to remote NAS appliances or cloud providers, including Qnap's myQNAPcloud service. The Hyper Data Protector (HDP) for PC/VM app secures VMware and Hyper-V virtualized environments, runs block-level backups of Windows PCs and servers with Qnap's HDP PC agent installed, and the latest version now presents its management console inside the QuTS web interface.

When QuTS Hero h6 is available for the TS-h1077AFU, it will add even more security features. Snapshots get a dedicated management app and enhance ransomware protection with policies for creating immutable snapshots that cannot be tampered with or deleted until the retention period you set has expired.

Other security features on the horizon are the Ransomware Guard which is accessed from the Malware Remover app, detects known malware and monitors processes for suspicious activity. The Secure IP Access feature will augment the QuFirewall app with granular IP-based access controls while the High Availability Manager app allows two identical appliances to be joined in a fault tolerant active/passive cluster.

Qnap TS-h1077AFU review: Is it worth it?

With an MSRP (manufacturer's suggested retail price) of £5,649 including VAT, the TS-h1077AFU will appeal to businesses that want all-Flash performance but without the big price premium for U.2 NVMe SSD support. We expect the actual street price to be lower but if you have slightly deeper pockets, rack space to spare and a desire for a lot more SATA SSDs, you may want to check out Qnap's 2U high, 30-bay TS-h3077AFU with Broadbandbuyer currently listing the 32GB model for £6,819 including VAT.

That said, the TS-h1077AFU offers a powerful hardware package for the price with an impressive SSD density for a 1U rack chassis. It delivers excellent 10GbE performance across the board, the QuTS software presents a wealth of data protection features and the price includes a generous 5-year warranty.

Qnap TS-h1077AFU specifications