Qnap TS-459 Pro+ Turbo NAS review

Barely has Intel's 1.8GHz dual-core Atom processor hit the shelves and Qnap has already dropped one into its latest range of NAS appliances. The TS-459 Pro+ is one of four new Turbo NAS models with this processor, and in this review we see if it brings any performance benefits.

Qnap claims the TS-459 Pro+ can deliver speeds of up to 116MB/sec, and we came close to this when measuring raw read performance using the Iometer utility. Real-world performance is lower, but this appliance is significantly faster than its predecessor.

For testing, we installed a quartet of 1TB WD SATA hard disks and created a RAID5 array. This took more than six hours to complete, and access to the volume was denied until it had finished. We called up a Dell PowerEdge R715 equipped with dual 12-Core Opteron 6174 processors, 32GB of DDR3 memory and running Windows Server 2008 R2. With a standard share mapped to the server, we saw Iometer report a raw read speed of 104MB/sec.

We then created a 50GB iSCSI target on the appliance and logged the server into it. We left Iometer running for a while; when it had settled down, we saw average raw read speeds of 114MB/sec.

Drag-and-drop copies of a 2.52GB video clip between the TS-459 Pro+ and the server returned average read and write speeds of 103MB/sec and 96MB/sec. For the older TS-459 Pro (web ID: 357481), we saw a much lower 62MB/sec for read and write operations.

FTP speeds were even better, with the FileZilla client reporting read and write speeds of 107MB/sec and 96MB/sec. With the previous model we reported FTP speeds of 80MB/sec and 72MB/sec. The appliance also handled small files well, with a 17.4GB collection of over 10,000 files copied from the server at a rate of 64MB/sec.

The latest firmware from Qnap doesn't add any radical new features and is more of a bug fix. Nevertheless, the TS-459 Pro+ isn't short on features, since it can host websites and web galleries, and has a built-in MySQL database server. It also offers plenty of backup tools suited to small businesses. You have block-level replication, where entire appliances can be backed up to remote Qnap systems and transfers can be encrypted. The appliance can manage scheduled copies of local volumes to external USB and eSATA devices too.

The bundled NetBak Replicator handles scheduled workstation backup and also supports Windows Server 2003 and 2008 systems. Performance isn't great, though: it took twice as long to back up our test folder as it did to do a simple drag-and-drop copy.

There's no denying Intel's new 1.8GHz Atom processor has had an impact on performance, making the TS-459 Pro+ one of the fastest four-bay NAS appliances available.

Author: Dave Mitchell