QNap TS-559 Pro II TurboNAS review

QNap's next generation of NAS appliances support SATA3 hard disks, have USB3 ports and support some interesting cloud backup services. Dave Mitchell puts the five bay TS-559 Pro II on test and sees whether it's the small business storage host with the most.

Reviews
By
published

Using the Dell server and a Broadberry dual X5560 Xeon server running the same OS, we mapped separate shares to them and ran Iometer on each one. After settling down, we saw an impressive cumulative raw read rate of 224MB/s.

IP SAN features are good as all QNap appliances support iSCSI thin provisioning which allows targets to be created that only use a small amount of space on the appliance, but appear much larger to the host. As more data is stored on the target, the appliance dynamically allocates extra space to it. Performance is good as well with a 50GB target returning a high raw read speed of 112MB/s.

IP SAN services come as standard and the appliance supports iSCSI thin provisioning as well.

IP SAN services come as standard and the appliance supports iSCSI thin provisioning as well.

For USB3 speed testing we inserted a Super Talent Express Drive Duo flash drive into the front port of the appliance and ran copy tests between this and a mapped share. Copying the test video clip to the share returned a read rate of 36MB/s and copying it back to the USB3 stick averaged a 16MB/s write speed. To put these results in perspective we ran the same copies using a USB2 flash drive which delivered read and write speeds of 20MB/s and 5MB/s.

For a five-bay desktop NAS appliance the TS-559 Pro II is competitively priced and has an excellent range of storage features. The USB3 ports improve backup speeds significantly and QNap's new cloud backup and file sharing services currently puts it one up over the competition.

So what's our verdict?

Verdict

QNap's new TS-559 Pro II combines an excellent range of storage features with lightning fast performance. The USB3 ports also perform very well and will make significant improvements if you're backing up to external storage devices. Small businesses especially will appreciate QNap’s free MyCloudNAS service for providing secure remote access to resources.

Chassis: Desktop CPU: 1.8GHz Intel Atom D525 Memory: 1GB DDR2 expandable to 3GB, 512MB DOM Storage: 5 x 3.5in.or 2.5in SATA2/SATA3 hard disk hot-swap bays RAID: Software managed Array support: RAID 0, 1, 5, 6, 5 + hotspare, JBOD Network: 2 x Gigabit Ethernet Other ports: 2 x USB3, 4 x USB2, 2 x eSATA Management: Web browser Software: QNap Finder, NetBak Replicator and Qget software bundled

Dave Mitchell
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.