Qnap TS-459 Pro Turbo NAS review

When Qnap launched its TS-439 Pro it claimed it was the first Atom-powered NAS appliance to market. The TS-459 Pro is another first for Qnap as it's powered by Intel's latest 1.66GHz D510 dual-core Atom processor.

On the surface, the TS-459 doesn't offer anything radically new, with Qnap focusing mainly on improved IP SAN features. It's proud of its VMware certification, which means it's compatible with VMware's vSphere 4 and can present virtual volumes as datastores with persistent reservations.

Version 3.2 of Qnap's Ajax-based web interface adds a daylight power-saving mode, a newly designed Web File Manager tool and support for Apple's Time Machine backup. It's well designed and on a par with the interface offered by Synology's latest appliances.

Installation is easy. We loaded four 1TB WD GreenPower SATA drives and used the menu and LCD display for a RAID5 build. If you want to cut power usage further, there are also mounting holes for 2.5in SFF hard disks.

For testing we timed drag and drop copies of a 2.52GB video clip from a Broadberry dual 2.8GHz X5560 Xeon rack server running Windows Server 2008. The processor helped the TS-459 to average read and write speeds of 62MB/sec, 30% faster than the TS-439.

FTP speeds saw a 25% boost, and IP SAN performance was also good, with Iometer returning a fast raw read throughput for a 50GB target of 102MB/sec. Qnaps's Download Station retrieved the test video clip from an FTP server at an average speed of 43MB/sec.

Qnap's Surveillance Station takes feeds from four IP cameras and offers live view, recording and motion detection services. It worked fine with an Axis 216FD camera, but Synology's appliances support up to 16.

Along with scheduled copies of local folders to attached USB and eSATA devices, the TS-459 supports block-level replication with other Qnap appliances. You define local and remote folders, apply a daily schedule and can opt to encrypt transfers. Once the first full copy is completed, subsequent runs will be much quicker as only deltas are sent over the remote link.

The NetBak Replicator looks after workstation backup and also supports Windows Server systems. It looks old now, but it worked well during testing.

The TS-459 puts plenty more features on the table as it can host websites, publish pictures and videos in a web gallery and has a built in MySQL database server. Multimedia functions include a UPnP media server, iTunes server and a Multimedia Station.

The TS-459 Pro is well built and quiet, and it can't be faulted for features. Backup options are good, IP SAN support is a cut above the rest and the Atom processor delivers a very good turn of speed.

Author: Dave Mitchell