QNAP TS-469 Pro review

The QNAP TS-469 NAS doesn’t look too different to the QNap TS-412 Turbo NAS home model which recently won our Best Buy award. The enclosure’s sturdy metal chassis and sliding drive caddies are very similar in appearance, although the TS-469 adds simple drive locks to help prevent anyone from fiddling with your disks. There’s also a K-lock security slot which can be used to tether it to a desk or wall. A mono LCD status screen allows you to check on the NAS’s IP address, Firmware version and even access a control menu. Once you’ve set up the NAS, the control menu lets you view the status of your drives and even reboot, shut down and change the admin password, but it’s difficult to navigate and select items using just two buttons and far too easy to select an option you didn’t want.

The NAS has a rather impressive specification, with four hot-swappable SATA3 bays, a 2.13GHz dual-core Intel Atom D2700 processor and 1GB RAM, which can be upgraded to a maximum of 3GB. Located on the front panel is a USB port which ties into the TS-496’s one-touch copy feature, which you can set up to immediately copy data from any USB drive you connect to a designated directory on the NAS. At the rear of the device are two Gigabit Ethernet ports, four USB2 ports, two USB3 ports and a couple of eSATA ports. While this desktop NAS can’t be expanded with disk modules in the way that some rack-mount NAS hardware can, there’s plenty of room for expansion, as long as you don’t mind plugging in lots of external drives to the NAS’s ports. The USB ports can also be used to connect up to three printers you wish to share across your network. There are also HDMI and VGA ports – we expected to be able to connect a monitor and a USB mouse and keyboard to control the NAS directly, but the graphics ports currently don’t do anything.

Configuring the NAS, installing its operating system and setting up its disk volumes is all fairly painless. QNAP’s Finder program locates the NAS on your network, checks its status and sends you to the NAS’s web-based configuration interface if it’s not yet been set up. As well as allowing you to name the device and set it up to use a NTP server, you’re also prompted to select which services you wish to enable from a list. Microsoft (SMB) Networking, a web-based file manager and FTP are enabled by default, but you can also activate Apple networking, NFS share, web server and MySQL Server, as well as more typically consumer-oriented services such as a UPnP and iTunes media server, a Multimedia Station which provides a web interface to media stored on the NAS and a Download Station that lets you configure the NAS to download files via BitTorrent, HTTP, FTP or via the RapidShare file sharing service.

It’s not as glossy as some rivals’, but QNap provides a clear user interface

With that done, you’re prompted to set up your disks. The NAS supports RAID 0, 1, 5, 6, 10 or JBOD disk configurations and will automatically default to an appropriate RAID configuration to ensure that you have at least one redundant disk. In our transfer speed tests, we used a pair of disks configured in a RAID 1 array. Transfer speeds were a little disappointing, with a large file average of 29.8MB/s and an average transfer speed of 13.2MB/s. Its performance in our iSCSI transfer test was significantly faster, but we experienced inconsistent transfer speeds on our initial couple of runs through the test, before we achieved a fast and stable result of an average 61.9MB/s in our large file test and 31.1MB/s in our small file transfer test.

The NAS has plenty of extra features beyond acting as a file server. These include web and mail servers, which are respectively useful for web development and very small enterprises, but we’d generally recommend dedicated external hosting for added security. If you employ remote workers, the NAS can act as a VPN server to allow them to access your network as though they were connected locally. The NAS supports MySQL and phpMyAdmin, which makes it ideal for use as a local database server, too.

The MySQL Server is particularly handy if you want to set up a database

There’s also an excellent range of backup features, including the ability to back up all or selected data stored on the NAS to cloud storage services including Amazon’s S3 servers. This provides an extremely useful additional layer of protection if you plan to use your NAS as a backup target. QNAP provides its own NetBack Replicator software to make it easy to back up and restore content from the PCs on your network either on demand or on a fixed schedule. The NAS also supports Apple’s Time Machine backup system. There are numerous third-party packages available that allow you to use the NAS as a proxy server, Asterisk VoIP server or add a Joomla CMS for your website.

The TS-469 Pro’s interface is rather plain when compared to the glossy windowed GUI of rivals such as Synology, but it’s easy to use. A tree view helps you locate different feature categories, from disk management to network services and application servers. Clicking into any of these opens an icon-based menu pane where everything’s clearly laid out.

The TS-469 is extremely well specified, with SATA3 connections for internal drives and plenty of scope to expand your storage with external drives. The NAS’s transfer speeds via SMB were a little disappointing, though. iSCSI speeds were significantly faster, but we experienced problems getting our transfer to copy in a stable manner during a couple of iterations of our test. Nonetheless, at £632, it’s a good value NAS, with a well laid out interface and plenty of features.