IT Pro Verdict
Qnap is unique as it’s the only vendor that currently offers desktop NAS appliances that support eight 3.5in. or 2.5in. drives. This gives the TS-859 Pro a price advantage over eight-bay rack mount appliances that cost around 25 per cent more. Performance is very good, it’s quiet, has plenty of business-focused features and support for IP SANs is better than most.
On review we have the top dog TS-859 Pro Turbo NAS which supports eight hot-swap SATA drives in a compact desktop chassis. Pricewise, it's comparatively good value as we found the diskless model going for a shade under a grand at Span Computers.
Build quality of the TS-859 is solid enough and at its heart beats Intel's very latest 1.66GHz dual-core D510 Atom processor. The D510 is teamed up with 1GB of DDR2 memory and our performance tests show that although Atoms aren't known for their speed, the appliance acquitted itself very well.
You have plenty of port permutations with a pair of Gigabit ports that can be teamed up for load balancing and link resilience. A quartet of USB2 and pair of high-speed eSATA ports are for adding external storage. Cooling is handled by two whopping great 12cm diameter fans and their size has allowed Qnap to throttle them back so the appliance is virtually silent.
For testing we popped a quartet of 1TB WD GreenPower drives in the appliance and used its LCD control panel to get a RAID-5 array build underway. You also have support for RAID-6 dual-redundant arrays along with capacity expansion and array migration.
General installation is handled by the Qnap Finder utility which provides quick access to the main web interface. And what a pretty thing it is too. Qnap's earlier web interface was a dour affair but since following Synology's lead and moving to Ajax it now looks vastly superior to its predecessor.
It loads up with 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 offering easy access to all features.
