This is a remote hard disk for homes and SOHO environments that connects over
a 10/100/1000 Mbps Ethernet link. It takes a single SATA hard disk and has an
eSATA (external SATA) port to add SATA hard disks externally. It has two USB
ports at the rear and one in front for USB drives, printers, and digital cams.
Typical usage scenario includes setting it up to face outwards on your broadband
Internet connection, website hosting and file sharing. The key features of
TS-101 include the following:
Built-in Internet servers: It has an embedded Linux OS with quite a
few bundled servers that let you create and host websites, and files for
download via FTP or Torrent, and share photographs and multimedia. The built-in
web server supports PHP and SQLite (an embedded database) for server-side
scripting. Note that, there is no built-in way to generate torrent seed files.
You need to do this elsewhere and then upload it to the TS-101 for users to
download. One can control all downloads. The Turbo Station generates
thumb-nailed galleries out of uploaded images. It can show images present in
connected digital cameras. Images can be rotated, resized and printed onto
attached USB printers. If you have audio/video files like MP3 and iTunes files,
those can be easily uploaded and the device can be used as a multimedia
streaming server.
USB, sharing and Q-RAID 1: When storage devices (like USB drives) are
connected to it, you can quickly transfer all its contents to the TS-101 using a
'Copy' button on the device. Printers, digital cameras (as a removable disk)
and USB drives when connected are instantly shared over the network. It has an
interesting RAID feature that does mirroring with other storage products. To use
it, you need a storage device that's formatted with the 'ext3' file
system. You can format to ext3 using the TS-101's disk administration
interface. This web UI also provides an easy way to restore this data in just a
couple of clicks.
Access control: You can create both users and user groups in TS-101
and assign them rights to different folders using the web UI. The administrator
does not automatically get access to the new folders, which is different from
other access control systems where they always get full access unless explicitly
denied. Though the QNAP has a fan-less and cool design, we found that the device
heated up dramatically over a period of time despite being run in an
air-conditioned environment.
Performance: You can use the TS-101 to take backups of PCs you have
using the NetBak Replicator software bundled with it. One needs to install this
software on each PC to take backups from and add the folders to watch and
replicate to the Turbo Station. This software is a simple two-box interface with
one box listing the local file system and the second one of the TS-101. We
tested the performance of this feature using about 7.35 GB of data (39,724 files
from a standard desktop we had around). It took 1 hour and 40 minutes to
complete the backup process.
BOTTOM LINE: The device has some interesting features, but the price
is a little steep.
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