Install:

Fan

Rear view

Power/network/USB

As with pretty well every NAS on the market, QNAP includes a setup program to guide you through setting up the TS-409 pro. It only takes about 30 seconds to run through and get the basic admin password and DHCP settings. As with every raid device, formatting times depend on the size of the drives. Generally if you start setup overnight, it will be finished in the morning no matter how large the drives are. If I had to ask for anything though, I would love a status LCD display for the current IP address just the same. It wouldn’t be a problem for most businesses that don’t make a lot of changes to their network, but it is one of the most useful features of other NAS systems.

The hard drives are hot swappable, and each have a sled with a latch and locking handle. There could be better guides to get each sled into the rails, but it is the only minor complaint I have with the design of the 409’s hardware.

Tidy cables

Closer view

Power connectors

Someone has spent a lot of time designing the TS-409, I was very impressed when I voided the warranty to checkout the guts. Everything is very nicely tied down and hidden away. The Motherboard doesn’t have much to it, and the fan is well placed. They have chosen to go with an external power supply, it is quite large, but at least it won’t heat up the drives.

Cover removed

Internal view

Front ports and lights

Setup with the web config is a breeze, the website has well laid out options that make it clear what they do. Going through all the options here is also impossible, but the screenshots do a good job of explaining the RAID and Hard drive setup.

Selecting Raid type

Raid Formatting

Admin page

The home screen of the website configuration can be customized with direct links to some of the different features. The download station is one that I prefer to have selected on mine. Initially I thought that the Download section was not working, but after speaking with Qnap, I determined that it is not compatible with the Opera browser. It works flawlessly in Firefox, but it would be nice to see it working in Opera, as that is my choice of browser on both PC and Mac.

Packing

Plastic wrap

Enable web server

The bitTorrent and FTP/HTTP downloading has a nice basic feature set. It is very simple, with the option to choose your ports, maximum share ratio and download/upload speeds. Power users will want to stick with other 3rd party apps, users who don't need to tweak everything will be satisfied. One feature they definitely do need to include though, is the ability to directly link to a torrent URL. Currently you must hand it a .torrent file, but ftp and http URLS can be managed using the system currently.

Custom home screen

Download Station

Hard drive testing

Performance and Testing:

Firsts things first, how I’ve setup the Qnap TS409 Pro is as such.

• 4X 320GB Seagate 7200.10, in RAID 5.

• 16 port Dlink gigabit switch.

Testing systems:

• 2 X 2ghz dual core Xeon Mac pro, 3GB ram, OSX

• 2.4ghz Q6600, 4GB ram, Windows 2003 Server

Performance will vary depending on RAID type, hard drive speeds, and network bandwidth. You should never have it setup in anything other than RAID 5 unless you have specific needs, or too few drives (In my opinion anyway). For the network, gigabit switchs are a must as well when dealing with this much storage. Doing a complete backup of even 200GB over 100BaseT networks is painful.

If everything was running perfectly, 100BaseT can possibly get 12.5MB/s. Gigabit Ethernet can handle 10X that if everything was perfect. That happens to be the same speed that the current fastest hard drive from Western Digital, the ‘VelociRaptor’. You’ll never see those speeds with current network hardware, but anywhere from 30-50MB/s is the norm.

Test Results:

It's quite the wide band between uploads and downloads, I almost thought I made a mistake during the first run-through. 15MB/s is a little slower than I was expecting, but it's not bad. 20 MB/s for uploading a single large file is closer to what I was expecting. Download speeds are excellent, and allow for streaming of virtually any content directly off the drive. That is about twice the speed of a 16X DVD drive, and I have mounting DVD images that are stored over my gigabit network directly for a long time now.

Extra note:

HDD SMART'er

The 409  has by far the most in depth Hard drive SMART monitoring reports I have seen thus far on a NAS. Performance is nice, but being able to keep and eye on my drives and potentially find a problem drive before it craters is something I can really appreciate. In the last year I have had 4 hard drives decide they'd had enough, even if it's in a RAID5 array, it's not my idea of a good time.

Final thoughts:

Qnap TS 409 Pro

$550-600 stock, $950 with 4X500GB drives. The price might be a little high right now, only because it is still fairly new (Older versions lacked the latching hard drive sleds for one). Looking through Ebay, the prices are bang on retail, no one wants to part with one very badly right now. That is usually a good sign that everyone is happy with their purchase.

Support response times aren't always stable, one time might be good, another could take hours, so I don't always bring them up. This time though, I think I have to mention my experience with Qnap. While I was testing the Download Station, I thought something was wrong because the downloads were not showing up (Turns out it was that incompatibility with Opera as I mentioned) so I sent off an email. Less than half an hour later, I already had a response with possible solutions. That's impressive by anyone's standards.

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