IT Pro Verdict

The TVS-1271U-RP offers a big hardware spec at a competitive price and an unbeatable expansion potential. However, real world performance is average and the top model on review is best suited to hardware intensive apps such as Qnap’s Virtualization Station.

Reasons to buy

+
Choice of hardware; Big expansion potential; 10GbE ready; Extensive cloud backup apps

Reasons to avoid

-
Noisy fans; Supports read cache only; Average real world speeds

By Dave Mitchell

published 3 June 2015

in Reviews

Installation and storage features

Qnap's cloud portal streamlines installation as the quick start routine asked for our NAS model after which we entered the Cloud Key printed on the label on the top panel. We then logged into our myQNAP cloud account to register the appliance and assign it a unique name for remote web access.

We loaded a quartet of 4TB WD hard disks and let the routine create a single RAID5 array. Storage pools are very flexible as they can be expanded into new drives on demand and we could create multiple thin and thickly provisioned volumes for our NAS shares and iSCSI targets.

The TVS-1271U-RP supports up to four SSDs in bays 1-4 as read caches but you can save them all for general storage by using the dual, internal mSATA sockets instead. We slotted in a pair of 256GB mSATA modules and once the appliance was back up, they appeared in the QTS Storage Manager app ready for configuration.

Qnap's range of local and cloud backup apps just keeps on getting better

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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.