QNAP TS-469 Pro review

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.