QNAP TS-409 Pro "TurboNAS"

INTRODUCTION

Data assurance and security is ever an increasing issue for end users and businesses alike. It almost doesn’t need to be said: drive prices as ever continue to decrease and drive capacity only increases, with drives totaling 1.5 terabytes expected by the end of this year. Even today several 1TB drives from major manufacturers are common to find at the magic 17 cents per gigabyte ($169) mark, so backing up and securing that ever growing amount of data is only going to be an increasing concern.

Business users especially tend to travel frequently and need their mission critical data to travel with them, and travel safely. Flash drives are the greatest thing since “organic” sliced bread was invented, but they are easily lost and still cost around $133 for a 32GB drive. (For those wondering, that is $4.15 per GB.) The cheap off-brand flash drives also tend to die with your precious data significantly earlier than the average name brand flash drive.

So, why a NAS?

So what does this all have to do with a NAS review? The simple fact is a NAS can provide easy data backup and data security for the home or office network, a data hub to act as a centralized source for the office to store and find the most recent versions of important data, and last but not least allowing direct access to your data from the internet while on the go. The QNAP TS-409 Pro “TurboNAS” even goes one step further by offering the ability to directly host websites, MySQL databases, web forums, FTP servers, or replace that PC you dedicate for (undoubtedly legitimate) P2P torrents.

Using an old PC as the home fileserver in place of a NAS is a great (not to mention cost effective) alternative, and the user does also have the ability to use the machine for hosting websites and providing web access to data. However there are several reasons a RAID control card would still be needed for the best data security, and a NAS happens to provide the same functionality in a much smaller, less noisy, and much more power efficient footprint. A NAS provides the same as (and better) drive security than can only be had with a dedicated RAID card, for example a cheap motherboard with Intel’s RAID will not on its own automatically rebuild the array from a hot spare when a drive does fail.

It also doesn't need to be pointed out Windows Home Server made a name for itself with corrupting files under very specific situations, namely multiple drive configurations where Windows Home Server's Drive Extender must be used in conjunction with programs that write incremental file updates to open files. Because this is a underlying flaw with Windows Home Server's file system itself a simple patch will not fix the issue, and this is why Microsoft has to wait until the first "service pack" before this problem can be addressed. Perhaps this service pack will also add the missing ability to automatically backup stored files on WHS boxes.

This brings us to our review today of the QNAP “TurboNAS” TS-409 Pro NAS unit, which as the first number indicates can house up to four SATA hard drives. This is QNAP’s newest, top of the line NAS device and it aims to do almost anything except serve you coffee in the morning. By the end of our review we will find out if it offers good performance, provides good data protection, and if it stands out from their competition in some way. With a name like QNAP (Quality Network Appliance Provider), you expect it to be a quality product.
 

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