QNAP TS-809U-RP Turbo NAS review

Along with many other NAS appliance vendors, up until now Qnap has focused primarily on serving the consumer markets but its latest rack mount system is one of its first to target SMBs. There’s a big difference between what consumers and businesses want out of their network storage and in this review we see what the TS-809U-RP has to offer for the latter.

This 2U rack appliance has eight lockable hot-swap bays supporting all the latest SATA high-capacity drives. Its specification looks good as well as you have a 2.8GHz Intel Core 2 Duo teamed up with 2GB of DDR2 memory making this one of the best specified appliances at this price point.

Full fault tolerance is on Qnap’s menu as the appliance supports software managed stripes, mirrors, RAID5 and RAID6 arrays. With eight bays to play with the latter becomes a reality so you can have dual-drive redundant arrays.

Make sure you use the latest firmware or you could miss out on Qnap’s smart new Ajax-based management interface.

Power is covered as the appliance comes as standard with two compact 300W hot-plug supplies. Fault tolerance also extends to the network connection as the two Gigabit ports can be joined together in a variety of load balanced or failover teams.

Installation is a swift process as the bundled Qnap Finder utility searches the network for appliances and displays them ready for configuration. From here you can go straight to the web console and we recommend upgrading the firmware to the latest version as you won’t want to miss out on Qnap’s slick new Ajax-based web interface.

For performance testing we configured a triplet of 1.5TB Seagate Barracuda SATA drives as a RAID-5 array.

On first contact you get a smart Apple iTunes style cover flow menu for accessing management, shared folders, the surveillance station, support and forums. The main administrative interface is very easy to use with a tree menu to the side making for easy access to the many features.

Client support is excellent as Windows, Linux, Unix and Mac systems are all on the guest list. The appliance offers a local user and group database for access security but you can also integrate it with AD domain authentication. Quotas control storage usage and these can be applied individually and globally where they affect all users.