QNAP TS-809PRO NAS Review

Introduction

The QNAP TS-809PRO is an 8-bay NAS that will instantly appeal to business users as a result of its sheer size packing a colossal 16TB. It seems size alone does not matter now days, as the features are also packed to the hilt and these will be rather hard for the home user to ignore. Many of the TS-809PRO’s will find good homes to go to. The TS-809PRO tower and TS-809U-RP rack mount are clearly the top of the line NAS appliances that have provided QNAP a rapid convergence from the home arena to the world of enterprise, education and government, with little or no fuss. The TS-809PRO also tops the charts in the vertical market segmentation with photography, publishing and printing industry customers leading the category in the number of unit sales and revenue income. This comes as no surprise considering the huge capacity it can contain. There are quite few cousins of the TS-809PRO that have tried to stake a claim that it’s making and, by the reputation these units have, it may be worth a look if the TS-809 PRO is slightly above your budget line. A brief look at the TS-509 PRO and TS-639 left an impression on us enough to get the units in our labs very swiftly. What is most impressive is from the handful of leading QNAP resellers we spoke with, over 60% of them are outselling the TS-809PRO over the NETGEAR ReadyNAS PRO 6-bay unit. We understand from current statistics provided to us, NETGEAR is a leader in this space, not for long, if we were are believe what the resellers are telling us. We will shortly be reviewing the NETGEAR ReadyNAS PRO.

Figure 1: QNAP TS-809 PRO Dimensions

The Vital Stats

The QNAP TS-809 is powered by an Intel Core 2 Duo 2.8 GHz processor, recently upgraded from 2.4GHz, so make sure to ask for the 2.8GHz version. We understand this commenced shipping form April 2009, so it should not pose a problem to get. The processor is aptly supported with 2GB DDRII RAM, an excellent combination as it seems optimized by the firmware as it peaks for performance at that level. Installing another 2GB memory hardly made a difference and that may well be as a result of the fact that the firmware was optimized for 2GB and will not take advantage of the extra memory. Irrespective, the performance difference was so minimal with the extra 2GB when transferring files greater than 4GB in all transfer sessions, we would not push for recommending the upgrade. The specification list continues with 8-bays of 3.5” to house SATA II drives; these are all in a tray to facilitate hot-swapping. Why anyone would want to hot-swap unless you are in a critical data center environment, baffles us as merely turning the unit off and removing a drive is as simple! A compatibility list provided by QNAP allows users to establish which drives are supported and recommended by the manufacturer. We have always recommended users to buy units with pre-installed disks from resellers that provide the service to install, test and turn the unit into a system ready for users to plug in and use. This allows for any unforeseen occurrences to be avoided, like DOA to units or even drives. The unit has 5 x USB 2.0, one at the front, to cater for one touch copy to a USB data device, and four at the back allowing for connectivity to USB based peripherals. Dual Gigabit RJ-45 Ethernet ports support multi-IP settings allowing connectivity to two different subnets, as well as load-balancing and failover services. We did notice the TS-809 lack of support for eSATA, a useful interface if USB is too tedious for transferring data. As far as connectivity is concerned this pretty much rounds off all that is available.

Figure 2: TS-809 PRO Indicators and Connectivity

The TS-809PRO is built well and designed to ensure ease of use for both business and home users alike. The design theme is very much a QNAP standard now as it seems aside from the bay configuration differences the TS-439, TS-509, TS-639 through to the TS-809 all share the same design aspects. At first glance one can be forgiven to see it as large unit, but it is a decent size that allows sensible air flow for cooling of the drives sufficiently so as not to overheat, what with 8-bays this in itself is a huge task! The size measure an acceptable 270 (D) x 200 (W) x 298 (H) mm, and the units runs at a sensible 38.7dB, which is an acceptable sound level, with 8 drives installed and whilst conducting busy read and writes the unit was measured at 42.1dB at the highest peak, again quite acceptable, in a sensible busy environment or in a theater room, at home. The TS-809 pro power is courtesy of a 350W, 100-240 auto switching power supply; it was found sufficient for a load of 8x2000GB drives. The diskless device weighs in at a handsome 9Kg inclusive of the outer carton, not bad but not exactly featherweight! The TS-809PRO sports the customary LCD panel providing Status, LAN, USB, HDD 1, HDD 2, HDD 3, HDD 4, HDD 5, HDD 6, HDD 7, HDD8, USB, LAN activity. We would like to see manufacturers such as QNAP adopt the OLED panels as these are power saving as well as easy to manage and have a higher reliability ratio. The LCD panel is only served as an extension of what can be realized within the management software of the unit, as that is where all the major housekeeping occurs.

Open, RAID, Set and Store

Unpacking and removing the unit to installing drives took us less than thirty minutes. Please make sure if you are installing drives you are able to take the appropriate anti-static precaution in case you accidentally touch the printed circuit board, on the back of the hard disk drive. Everything needed to install drives is provided and it is not that difficult. We do advise all our readers to consider buying units ready assembled and tested by resellers, and we mean resellers, not manufacturers like Netgear, who add a handsome markup, and are pretentious of having tested units, when clearly they have not even tested units beyond completing the RAID formatting... The important word here is "tested"; if the units are not tested with the hard drives installed to an accepted level to ensure a very low risk of Dead on Arrival (DOA), then don’t buy it with drives installed. The premium for this service should not exceed maybe maximum 10 percent.

When we booted up, the LCD presented us with a selection of which RAID we wanted, once selected we were prompted, if you wish, to select the AES 256-bit volume-based encryption, this will allow access to the hard disk by an authorized password. Using this feature does allow a certain level of protection in case the NAS gets into the wrong hands. Once, this is completed the TS-809PRO then sets about to format the unit to the desired RAID level selected. No more needs to be done until the unit has completed the task. A unit with 2TB disk capacity can take up to five hours to complete.

The RAID levels supported are impressive and more than sufficient. Single disk, RAID 0 (Disk Striping), RAID 1 (Disk Mirroring), RAID 5, RAID 5+ Hot spare, RAID 6, and JBOD (Linear Disk Volume). RAID 5 was selected for our testing purposes. One of the question we receive frequently from our readers is whether the QNAP TS-809PRO supports just installing a few drives and then expanding without loss of data when new drives are installed? The answer is yes, it does support capacity expansion on the fly, one disk at a time though, and the feature is referred to as online RAID capacity expansion by QNAP.

TIP – Make sure before you do anything you have a backup of all your data, there are no guarantees this procedure will work at all times. Be safe, Backup your Backup

NOTE: Need to know more on how RAID works? – Click Here

Once completed, locating the NAS on the network should be an easy task, checkout the LCD panel and inspect what IP address has been selected, as the NAS acts as a DHCP server. If this is not easy for you to do, install the supplied utility from the CD provided called QNAP FINDER, invoking which will help find the NAS and allow you to login.

Figure 3: QNAP Finder

Features that will exhaust your needs

Management of the unit is via an intuitive AJAX based web interface, a vast improvement from previous offering, although the controls remain the same. The new interface is a great launching pad for the host of rich features this unit has to offer.

Note: Checkout the Video on the QNAP Management Interface.

There are many features that make the QNAP TS-809PRO streets ahead of its competitors and we will touch upon a few of these.

Online RAID Capacity Expansion & RAID Level Migration.

Mentioned earlier, one of the most common features that is now a de-facto standard is one of being able to expand the NAS capacity (by adding more disk drives), without loss of data. This is possible in the TS-809PRO by adding one drive at a time, and waiting for the process to complete before inserting another one. The NAS can continue to operate as normal, as the process takes place in the background, as the name suggests online RAID capacity expansion. The second aspect of this feature is the ability to extend the RAID as well, say you start with two drives and are on RAID 1, adding a third will allow you to expand the RAID from RAID 1 to RAID 5, and once you go beyond four drives you may then expand further from RAID 5 to RAID 6, all this without loss of data, very impressive, this process is referred to as RAID level migration by QNAP.

TIP – Make sure RAID expansion is what you want to do, whilst you do not lose data when you go from RAID 5 to RAID 6, you are unable to perform backward RAID optioning (cannot go from RAID 6 to RAID 5), without first backing up your data and then reformatting, and restoring the data.

Both features are comprehensively led by prompts at each stage and QNAP has ensured all users are able to perform these tasks with ease. If you wish to examine the process, QNAP has a detailed explanation on its website – Take a look.

The TS-809PRO has a generous selection of file-systems as well ranging from EXT3 (Internal/external HDD) but has a limitation of 8TB and EXT4 (Internal/external HDD), which will enable users to extend beyond 8TB, allowing users to use large drives and expand without limitations posed by EXT3. FAT (External/HDD) and NTFS (External/HDD).

TIP – Select the appropriate file system initially, as a mistake here will mean you will need to backup all your data and start again. As an example – if you are installing 4 x2TB drives it may be fine to select EXT3 today, as the user capacity under RAID 5 will fall below 8TB (Volume limit for EXT3). IN the future adding larger capacity drives will be restrictive as you have a volume capacity limitation of 8TB. So, best to select EXT4 from the beginning and then use online RAID capacity expansion to add drives on the fly.

iSCSI with Thin Provisioning

Another fine feature is a built in iSCSI target service that will allow the device to act as a NAS and iSCSI target. The iSCSI target will facilitate connectivity for up to 8 iSCSI devices allowing a small scale IP-SAN farm and with the use of QNAP’s Virtual Disk Drive (VDD) you can turn all the other iSCSI storage based peripherals into virtual disks, which in turn can become single volumes on the NAS. This is further accentuated by the use of Virtual Space Allocation (Thin Provisioning) feature that will allow space to be allocated on a just-enough and just-in-time basis using Online RAID capacity expansion. The TS-809 can also operate simultaneously as an iSCSI target server and as a NAS server working through NFS, SMB/CIFS and AFP; this is achieved by creating two separate volumes.

NOTE: Want to know more about iSCSI? – Click here

Backup, FTP, Add-ons and Remote Replication

Aside from redundancy, storing and sharing files centrally, the ability to share those precious family photos and video’s with family and friends via a secure remote connection established using an FTP server feature or even using the Multimedia Station feature by setting up a fixed IP address and utilizing your routers DDNS service or obtaining your own domain name from any DDNS provider such as http://www.dyndns.com/. Other excellent features include the use of remote replication that will please business users, allowing replication of units to a remote location to make an allowance for quick data recovery in times of disaster. It is not difficult to set-up, all you need to do is connect the NAS to your LAN and forward the port 873 on your NAT router to the LAN IP address of the remote NAS. All that then needs to be done is to schedule a backup job/s and finally enable backup from remote server to the local host and allow remote Rsync server to back up data to NAS. We tested this with another NAS and after a little fiddling we did get the NAS to communicate with another non-QNAP NAS, which was impressive.

Note: Checkout the Remote Replication guide on QNAP Website.

If you wish to publish and host your own website, this can be achieved by using the Web server feature and turning the NAS into an all in one Web server, although we would advice caution and not use the unit for anything else as the performance will take a dive. All audio fans will welcome support for iTunes, and enabling the service can be done in 4 simple steps; select the service, insert a password, confirm the language required, and press apply, you are now connected. QNAP has also designed what it terms QPKG - a software platform that allows them to add software packages for extending support for all the NAS devices in its product portfolio. A fine example of this is providing support for Logitech’s Squeezebox product range by enabling Squeezcenter version 7, as well as support for Joomla an open source content management system for publishing content on the World Wide Web and intranets, and a host of many other software add-ons are also available. Need to have a little more security around the home or office?, then you are in luck simply add up to 4 IP based cameras and you have a Surveillance station that will let you not only view but also record sound, watch over your home or office remotely as well, so you can rest in peace if you are traveling overseas and need to keep tabs.

More Features…..

Aside from the features we have already mentioned the business users can take center stage with compatibility across all platforms for users of Windows, Mac, Linux, UNIX and we understand support for VMware too. Windows AD feature enables importing of user information (name and password) from an existing AD domain enabling users to get up to speed quickly, although creation of users and share folders can be done in batch mode, saving time and effort, all folders have the facilitation of being hidden as well for security purposes, if this is a requirement. The NAS also has the necessary management tools that one would expect. The TS-809PRO system fan is controlled automatically and also offers the option to be set manually if desired, along with email and instant SMS alert options for tracking events that may occur affecting the integrity of the device. This could take the form of a failing drive, memory failure, illegal boot operation and a host of other possible issues. The device also logs all events in detail when it connects via FTP, ATP, HTTP, HTTPS, SSH as well as networking services accessed by all online users... The salient features that impressed us were the remote replication, the ease of expanding the capacity of the drives and RAID set on the fly and the encryption to the RAID volume, both enabling data to be secure in the event the device goes missing and attempts to mount the volume on a Linux box would fail by a third party, as a result of the encryption.

Support

Our normal routine is to email and call anonymously, as we prefer to no reveal the source, this helps to get a fair and proper response. Firstly, it was email response, we received an email response within 24hrs and we found a resolve to our issue. Secondly, it was by telephone and the number is provided by QNAP, it seems basically its holding or group partner is IEI in CA. We called the Service Hotline number provided with the product and also listed on their web page: 909-595-2819 ext.110. Fortunately, for us we did not get a voicemail and actually got a human voice, after swapping information about the unit and the issue, we were able to get a resolve quickly. Our issue was not a major one and hence was not demanding. Overall, the support quality was above average and the response time was more than adequate.

Performance

Test Environment
QNAP TS-809PRO 2TB with 4 x 500GB Enterprise drives
Firmware Revision: v 3.1.2 Build1014
RAID LEVEL TESTED: RAID 5 (one drive parity)

Network
NETGEAR FSM726 10/100Mbps + 1000Mbps ProSafe Managed Switch

Test Method

We use a Real-World testing utility as well as a realistic Drag & Drop procedure as depicted in everyday normal operations.

Our tests are carried out with a combination of reads and writes, we do not separate the two, both are combined to produce an overall result that depicts the actual performance of the device tested.

This category is one of the most demanding from a file size perspective as the smallest size file is 2GB and the largest being 12GB.

A combination of demanding Video, Audio and Images files are combined to make this the most challenging category of them all.

The Office category is mainly for business users who may compare the typically used business applications, consisting of a spreadsheets, databases, Word, PowerPoint, Visio, and email management. We have also combined PhotoShop based images that are used to cut and paste within a document to make up a 30 page mailer as well as Visio templates used for presentation within a PowerPoint file that exceeds a 15GB file size.

Our Third category is a combination of files from the previous two categories to initiate copying, backing up, deleting all content and then restoring from a backup made within the RAID array.

Overall Conclusion

The QNAP TS-809PRO is a smooth operator, sleek looks and curves in the right places, hits the high note when the system engages into top gear and leaves everything behind it for dust. The speed is awesome and the features are plentiful for both business and home users alike, not a small feat to achieve. It’s a dream to set up and no hassle when in operation; QNAP has made a tremendous effort in bringing to market the TS-809PRO. Currently it has no equal in performance, features and ease of use. It stands head and shoulders above its peers. We would have liked to see a better warranty than the standard one year provided, and the price for the diskless is a little on the high side, however, we found a typical street price of $2595.00 for a 10TB system with 5x2000GB installed and tested from one of their reputable authorized resellers. This was more than acceptable for a great value proposition.