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QNAP TS-409 Pro Turbo NAS Review
Author: Dennis Garcia
Published: Tuesday, March 04, 2008
Product Design and Features
The QNAP TS-409 Pro Turbo NAS is a small tower and not much larger than an external RAID enclosure or 4 full size HDD stacked on top of each other. The front panel is actually a perforated door with a filter mesh behind it for ventilation. The back of the device features a fan port, power plug, Ethernet Jack and 2 USB ports.
Under the QNAP logo you'll find the status LEDs, power button and a single USB port. The various USB ports are designed as part of a one touch backup, simply plug in your USB device (flash drive, camera, external hdd etc..) and press the copy button. The TS-409 Pro will then copy everything from the device into a directory on the NAS.
Opening the door reveals the 4 drive hot swap bay with the drive trays listed in descending order. The TS-409 Pro supports a full array of RAID levels typical of 4 drive configurations. (JBOD, 0, 1, 5, 6, 5+ spare) For our functional tests we choose RAID 5. This level gives you the most storage with a single drive of hardware redundancy and a fair amount of performance. RAID 6 and 5 + 1 are only available in a 4 drive configuration while RAID 5 can be used with a minimum of 3.
Opening the door reveals the 4 drive hot swap bay with the drive trays listed in descending order. The TS-409 Pro supports a full array of RAID levels typical of 4 drive configurations. (JBOD, 0, 1, 5, 6, 5+ spare) For our functional tests we choose RAID 5. This level gives you the most storage with a single drive of hardware redundancy and a fair amount of performance. RAID 6 and 5 + 1 are only available in a 4 drive configuration while RAID 5 can be used with a minimum of 3.
The drive trays are made from folded metal and are secured in place with 2 thumb screws. The area around these screws is pretty tight so unless you have small fingers you'll need a Philips head screw driver to remove them.
We would have liked to have seen a traditional hot swap tray in place of these folded metal units thus making installation a little easier and giving the TS-409 Pro the look of an "enterprise server".
We would have liked to have seen a traditional hot swap tray in place of these folded metal units thus making installation a little easier and giving the TS-409 Pro the look of an "enterprise server".
