QNAP TS-101 NAS

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.