QNAP TS-659 Pro II Review
by Ganesh T S on September 19, 2011 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- IT Computing
- NAS
- QNAP
QNAP is a well known player in the SMB / SOHO NAS market. This market is a highly competitive one with many players like Synology, Thecus, Netgear, LaCie, Sagate and Western Digital. Consumers with a necessity to store and backup their home media collection also form a small segment of this market.
We have been playing around with the QNAP TS-659 Pro II unit over the last month or so. Based on the Intel Atom D525 platform, it has 6 bays and dual GbE ports, making it a candidate for the high end SMB market. The Pro II units introduced this year have a couple of USB 3.0 ports which the versions from the last year lacked.
The purpose of any NAS is to serve as a centralized repository for data while also having some sort of redundancy built in. The redundancy helps in data recovery, in case of media failure of any other unforeseen circumstances. In addition to the standard RAID levels, some companies also offer custom redundancy solutions. The OS on the NAS also varies across vendors.
The QNAP TS-659 Pro II runs a Linux variant (Turbo NAS v3.5 was used in our benchmarks) which can be managed through a web browser. Internally, the dual core Atom D525 runs at 1.8 GHz and has four execution threads, thanks to the hyper threading feature. There is 1 GB of RAM inbuilt, but it is possible for the end user to increase this. The dual GbE ports can be configured in multiple ways to provide load balancing or fault tolerance or just dynamically aggregating the bandwidth.
Let us conclude this section with a look at the marketing specs from QNAP:
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meesterlars - Tuesday, September 20, 2011 - link
Sorry, Ganesh, I must have not seen that you had written the review.Yes, please do try and recreate the issues documented in the forum. Perhaps a little publicity from you guys would pressure QNAP into action.
IaninKL - Friday, May 25, 2012 - link
Hi Ganesh,I've just bought a TS-559Pro-II, so far just using it for a short-term project so have configured as JBOD and loaded about 6TB of data. 5*2TB Enterprise-grade drives.
I am wondering if the issue raised here was ever resolved?
The linked-page on the QNAP Forums has been taken down and there is no follow-up info on this thread either.
Cheers - keep up the great work!
QNAPSimon - Friday, September 23, 2011 - link
Thanks for bring this to our attention. We at QNAP are aware of the problem and have allocated dedicated resources to look into this. I will follow up on this and provide updates on our forum. If you have related concerns please email me.simonchang@qnap.com
Thanks
Hrel - Tuesday, September 20, 2011 - link
Quick search found 940 online. No hard drives inluded. Bahaha, no.MobiusStrip - Wednesday, September 21, 2011 - link
That's just ridiculous. There's no reason you should have to put drives in sleds. They should go in like cartridges, with a simple Eject button to remove them. Like these toaster-style drive docks:http://www.newertech.com/products/hdddocks.php
If locks are all that important, the lock could be above each slot and simply move a bar down to lock the drive in.
ZPrime - Friday, September 23, 2011 - link
In many systems, caddies help with noise isolation. I have several HP Home Servers and the caddies are plastic, but they have silicone/rubber grommets around a metal peg that attaches to the drives. They are tool-less, FWIW.Caddies can also help insure proper grounding. Depending on your chassis composition (some are plastic or have plastic rails), you might need some other way to get the body of the drive to ground to the chassis. Plastic caddy + metal inserts that connect to a metal latch or similar can solve this problem.
ZPrime - Wednesday, September 21, 2011 - link
Just because you have an LACP bonded connection between two machines does *NOT* mean that transfers will take full advantage of this. When you were testing for performance, did you run multiple simultaneous transfers?LACP / 802.3ad load balancing isn't as simple as people think. Bonding a pair of 1GB NICs doesn't give you "2GB of bandwidth."
Nenad - Friday, September 23, 2011 - link
In short: iSCSI >> SMB for small files and when file-cache can be usedI have QNAP TS-459 Pro+ and QNAP TS-419P , and I use them both with SMB and iSCSI.
In your test, performance of iSCSI is similar to SMB, even with write cache disabled in most parts.
But in my practice I find iSCSI has noticeably better performance in many cases, especially when you work with many small files. That can be seen on your test in 'DIR copy', but as just one number among dozen other it does not stand out. Unfortunately, it is mostly DIR copy where you need or notice speeds - copying single file will usually end fast regardless of SMB/iSCSI, video playback needs much smaller bandwith anyway etc ... it is copy of large folders with subfolders you need (and notice) speed.
Another area where iSCSI seems to have advantage is with using file-cache on windows. I'm not precisely certain how that works, but it appears that windows do not use caches so efficiently for networked/remote disk, as it does for 'local' iSCSI disk.
One practical application of this is anti-virus scanners, who tend to scan 'other' disk when you copy files - resulting in almost double time needed to copy file to/from QNAP, since for example first Norton read file from SMB share to scan, and then allows Windows to copy it locally. With iSCSI I see much smaller impact , and I believe that while Norton probably work same with reading file to scan, Windows can better use file cache to skip another reading when it needs to copy.
Carlu - Monday, October 3, 2011 - link
I love this small boxes, good power-performance ratio, but it sux when it comes to fulldisk crypto. nether the CPU has any good support for it, nor does it handles harddrives with inbuilt disk crypto. And for the same amount of money you get a 20W Xeon 20L, and a micro atx motherboard/chassi etc... and the Xeon has support for AES-IN instruction set...