Product Reviews

When we reviewed Synology's storming DS508 (web ID: 207210) NAS appliance we declared it the fastest desktop storage box we'd seen, but QNAP's latest TS-509 Pro Turbo NAS aims to steal its thunder. Performance is high on its agenda, but the TS-509 also matches Synology for capacity since it's QNAP's first five-bay desktop app.

The TS-509 delivers in the hardware department, as it's endowed with a 1.6GHz Celeron processor partnered by 1GB of DDR2 memory, and it offers a pair of Gigabit ports that can be used individually or placed in a load-balanced or failover team.

RAID options are also good, and it supports online capacity expansion and RAID migration, where you can add more drives and upgrade on-the-fly to larger ones and migrate from a single drive to other RAID arrays.

You can set up RAID arrays from the front panel keypad and backlit LCD screen, but the tidy web interface offers a six-step wizard to get you up and running. We loaded a quartet of Western Digital Raptor drives and configured them as a high-speed RAID0 stripe and for performance testing we used a Dell PowerEdge 1950 dual quad-core

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Xeon rack server loaded with Windows Server 2003 R2.

This appliance is a speed demon: copies of a 2.52GB video clip returned average read and write speeds of 40.4MB/sec and 35MB/sec. Even more amazing was its FTP speeds: the FileZilla client reported read and write speeds of 74MB/sec and 52.8MB/sec.

The NetBak Replicator software handles workstation backup, and using this to secure 20GB of test data we saw backup speeds of 24MB/sec. QNAP also provides its Download Station for retrieving remote files using BitTorrent, HTTP and FTP. Using the bundled QGet utility we copied our video clip from our FTP server, which returned an impressive 43MB/sec over Gigabit.

QNAP has the upper hand for performance, but it also matches the best of the rest for features. For access security you have a local user and group database, support for AD and an IP filter for creating black or whitelists for specific addresses. General backup options include remote replication; this copies folders to a remote appliance to a schedule, encrypts and compresses the data, and runs incremental copies once a full backup has been taken.

Plugging a USB device into the front port and pressing the button next to it will copy all the data onto the appliance.

For multimedia there's a TwonkyMedia UPnP media server, an iTunes server with integrated smart playlists, and a Multimedia Station for storing and viewing photos.

You can run your own websites, as the app supports PHP4 and has an integral SQLite server, but QNAP's Surveillance Station feature won't be available until the next firmware release. If you need speed look no further than the TS-509 - the fastest desktop NAS app we've seen.