I just received my QNAP NAS yesterday figured I post a mini review for others who are in the market for a NAS.
I purchased the TS219P+ with a couple of 2TB Hitachi drives. This NAS is aimed at the small office/home setting.
Setup
Couldn't be easier. Screw the drives into the sleds and slide those into the house. Turn it on and your off. For the Mac you need to use the supplied QFinder app to connect to the NAS, at least initially. Once you do you're presented with a web page set up wizard that is extremely easy. which includes uploading the OS into the NAS. You have the option for seeing if Qnap updated the OS (which they did) so I downloaded the new version to apply. Going through the wizard, I was up and running with a RAIDED drive in under an hour.
Operation
Qnap offers AFP, SAMBA and iscsi among other methods to access the NAS. One bit of disappointment is that they don't include an iscsi initiator with the software and OSX doesn't have one built in. You need to either purchase Xtend SAN iscsi initiator for 200 dollars or take a chance on finding a free on that works decently. I'm opting not to use iscsi at the moment.
Interface
The interface ts clean easy to navigate and quite powerful. You can easily set up users, groups, shares and manage the environment and drives. One little niggle is that there are some predefine shares that cannot be removed. It seems QNAP hard codes some shares/apps to work. Such as the itunes streaming, its done through the multimedia share. I haven't tried to see of this works in a different share or install a newer version of twonky to give me the flexibility I was expecting. TimeMachine - once you enable the service and tell TM to use the Predefine TMBackup share and user TimeMachine along with its own password it seems to work. I've set mine up, I haven't initiated it though. Unlike the my former NAS that I returned (Seagate's Black Armor) I'm able to access/use my Aperture library on the NAS.
Performance
Performance is very good. I was able to move my 35gb itunes library in about 40 minutes and and a 50gb Aperture library in about an hour. I haven't done any exact or scientific benchmarks but being a former owner of Seagates Black Armor, there's a clear increase in performance that I'm seeing.
Noise
The unit is quiet, I'm not noticing any fan noise and its actually smaller then the Black Armor NAS. I also have hot swappable drives if the need arises.
Overall
I'm quite pleased with the unit, performance is stellar, management is powerful, and generally flexible with the exception of those predefined shares. I am disappointed in the lack of iscsi ability out of the box for OSX but I can live with that for now.
Edit:
I forgot to mention like many other linux based NAS units, AFP connectivity is broken with Lion, specifically TimeMachine backups. I'm not planning on upgrading to lion any time soon so that's not an issue for me. Keep this in mind and while many folks are expecting/waiting for an update from qnap, there's none as of today.
I purchased the TS219P+ with a couple of 2TB Hitachi drives. This NAS is aimed at the small office/home setting.
Setup
Couldn't be easier. Screw the drives into the sleds and slide those into the house. Turn it on and your off. For the Mac you need to use the supplied QFinder app to connect to the NAS, at least initially. Once you do you're presented with a web page set up wizard that is extremely easy. which includes uploading the OS into the NAS. You have the option for seeing if Qnap updated the OS (which they did) so I downloaded the new version to apply. Going through the wizard, I was up and running with a RAIDED drive in under an hour.
Operation
Qnap offers AFP, SAMBA and iscsi among other methods to access the NAS. One bit of disappointment is that they don't include an iscsi initiator with the software and OSX doesn't have one built in. You need to either purchase Xtend SAN iscsi initiator for 200 dollars or take a chance on finding a free on that works decently. I'm opting not to use iscsi at the moment.
Interface
The interface ts clean easy to navigate and quite powerful. You can easily set up users, groups, shares and manage the environment and drives. One little niggle is that there are some predefine shares that cannot be removed. It seems QNAP hard codes some shares/apps to work. Such as the itunes streaming, its done through the multimedia share. I haven't tried to see of this works in a different share or install a newer version of twonky to give me the flexibility I was expecting. TimeMachine - once you enable the service and tell TM to use the Predefine TMBackup share and user TimeMachine along with its own password it seems to work. I've set mine up, I haven't initiated it though. Unlike the my former NAS that I returned (Seagate's Black Armor) I'm able to access/use my Aperture library on the NAS.
Performance
Performance is very good. I was able to move my 35gb itunes library in about 40 minutes and and a 50gb Aperture library in about an hour. I haven't done any exact or scientific benchmarks but being a former owner of Seagates Black Armor, there's a clear increase in performance that I'm seeing.
Noise
The unit is quiet, I'm not noticing any fan noise and its actually smaller then the Black Armor NAS. I also have hot swappable drives if the need arises.
Overall
I'm quite pleased with the unit, performance is stellar, management is powerful, and generally flexible with the exception of those predefined shares. I am disappointed in the lack of iscsi ability out of the box for OSX but I can live with that for now.
Edit:
I forgot to mention like many other linux based NAS units, AFP connectivity is broken with Lion, specifically TimeMachine backups. I'm not planning on upgrading to lion any time soon so that's not an issue for me. Keep this in mind and while many folks are expecting/waiting for an update from qnap, there's none as of today.
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