Qsan TrioNAS LX U400HA-D424 review

Qsan’s new TrioNAS LX delivers enterprise-class storage features at a small business price

More redundancy and MUX boards

Each controller has seven Gigabit ports with six used for data and the seventh dedicated to management duties. As both controllers are active, all twelve ports are available for data services with dual redundant links for management access as well.

Each controller has an external SAS port and the appliance supports up to 256 hard disks. You can daisy-chain Qsan's J300Q JBOD disk shelves over redundant links and these units also have dual PSUs and fans.

The appliance supports SAS drives but if you want to use SATA drives you'll need to fit Qsan's MUX interposer boards at the rear of each drive carrier. Costing around 40-50 each, these do negate the cost benefits of using cheaper SATA drives.

ZFS provides an impressive range of storage management features including deduplication

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.