IT Pro Verdict

Qnap’s first AMD-based NAS appliance is packed with features and delivers in the value stakes. Combine its dual HDMI ports with the AMD SoC and Qnap’s QvPC and you have a classy multimedia platform as well.

Reasons to buy

+
Good value; 10GbE as standard; Masses of backup apps; Virtualisation Station; QvPC technology

Reasons to avoid

-
Modest 10GbE NAS write speeds

By Dave Mitchell

published 20 April 2015

in Reviews

10GbE performance

To test NAS performance we loaded four 4TB WD Red hard disks and created a RAID5 array. We hooked the appliance up to a Dell PowerEdge R730 rack server with an Emulex dual-port 10GbE adapter and running Windows Server 2012 R2.

After mapping a share to the server over 10GbE, we saw Iometer report raw read and write speeds of 1,069MB/sec and 629MB/sec. This is slightly faster than Qnap's claims but write speeds are noticeably lower than Synology's mighty 12-bay DS3615xs which mustered 1,113Gbps.

Even so, real world speeds were impressive with copies of our 50GB Iometer test file returning read and write speeds of 404MB/sec and 310MB/sec. Backup performance over 10GbE is also respectable with our 22.4GB test folder and its 10,500 small files secured to a share at an average of 182MB/sec.

The TVS-863+ supports encryption but only at the volume level whereas Synology allows you to create encrypted shares within volumes. Nevertheless, with AMD's integral AES-NI engine on the case, a 50GB file copy to an encrypted volume averaged 147MB/sec.

The HybridDesk Station app provides local access to the appliance allowing it to be used for multimedia or as a PC and IP camera monitor

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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.