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QNAP TS-459 Pro II Turbo NAS

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S Aadeetya
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NAS or network attached storage is the most common storage device used in most organizations today. The good thing about NAS devices is that their storage capacity is increasing without an equivalent increase in their physical size. Plus, they're becoming more feature rich, incorporating more enterprise grade features. We reviewed one such NAS, the QNAP TS-459 Pro II, which is suitable for workgroups and SMBs. This model has 4 bays for SATA drives, which can host 3 TB drives, thereby giving you a total capacity of 12 TB.

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Applies to:

Rs 59,000 (1 year warranty)



Meant for: SMBs


Key Specs: 4 hot-swappable HDDs, Intel Atom D525 1.8GHz dual core processor, 1GB DDR III RAM, web-based GUI
Pros:Has iSCSI features for flexible storage server deployment

Cons: No redundant power supply

Contact: QNAP, Chennai, Email:mario.praveen@redington.co.in



Recommendation: Buy

SMS Buy 130720 to 56677





Features

The QNAP TS-459 Pro II looks the same as its predecessor, the 459 Pro (reviewed in November '10), but differs in its hardware configuration. It's based on an Intel Atom D525 1.88 GHz dual core processor coupled with 1 GB DDR III RAM. The NAS boasts of enterprise level features like iSCSI support, thin provisioning, multiple RAID type support, etc. The wide range of RAID options gives you the flexibility to use the system as a primary, secondary or archive backup solution. The unique 'Virtual Disk Drive' feature adds flexibility to expand its NAS capacity. With built-in support for iSCSI initiator, the TS-459 Pro II can connect to other iSCSI targets on the network and turn them into virtual disks, which become multiple single volumes on the NAS. The user simply accesses the NAS and gets all iSCSI targets as local storage. This NAS also supports SATA III (6Gbps) hard drives which can result in faster data transfer speeds. It also has two USB 3.0 ports for faster data transfers. It has a 16x2 LCD front screen, which let's you configure the NAS without connecting it to a system. In fact, you can choose the RAID level to configure on the device directly from the LCD panel, which is only possible through a web interface in other NAS devices in its class. The two Gigabit Ethernet ports allow you to create either a failover or load-balancing system by connecting it to two separate networks.

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Performance

We populated the NAS with four 80 GB 7200rpm SATA drives. The installation was straightforward, and through the intuitive web GUI we could configure the NAS at RAID 0 for maximum performance. We ran the Intel NAS Performance Toolkit benchmark, and got 57.5 MB/s while copying files to the NAS, and 52.8 MB/s while copying files from it. These results are higher than its predecessor as well as another NAS we had reviewed back in November 2010, the Thecus N5500.

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Bottomline: As compared to other NAS boxes that fall in the same Rs 50-65k price bracket and have 4 bays, we find that QNAP is way ahead of competition in performance. Plus, it provides many enterprise grade features. These allow you to use it in virtualized environments, and use it either for file storage or as an iSCSI target. Overall, the intuitive features this NAS comes loaded with, make it a worthy purchase.

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