QNAP TS-259 Pro NAS Server Review

Network storage is a concept that many people use without a second thought in corporate environments, but what about at home? Count the number of PCs in your house and tell me it wouldn't be nice to have one central location for backups, video and music storage, and the inevitable centralized grocery store list(s). All that and much more is readily available in a Network Attached Storage server. The QNAP TS-259 Pro NAS server uses a powerful and energy-efficient 1.66GHz Intel Atom D510 processor with 1GB of DDR2-800 system memory to eliminate any potential bottlenecks in the device itself. Dual Gigabit Ethernet network interfaces allow failover safety and teaming, while two SATA drive bays offer single disk, JBOD, and RAID 0/1 configurations. Benchmark Reviews examines the QNAP TS-259 Pro in detail here and compares its performance against a wide variety of network attached storage servers.

Three features dominate the discussion of network storage hardware: data capacity, data security, and data transfer speed. On the software side, the current crop of NAS devices offer a dizzying array of applications to help manage and distribute the data, but they're of limited use if you need to be an MSCSE to figure them out. QNAP has always aimed for the high end of the NAS server market with performance and features such as dual Gigabit Ethernet with failover, a full range of RAID functionality, and a diverse, feature-rich user interface. They've recently upgraded the software suite that is supplied with the majority of their product line, and we'll look at both its capabilities and ease of use.

I mentioned the corporate IT environment earlier, and QNAP has plenty of solutions for that market. Today though, we're going to look at a NAS device that is scaled down for the small office/home office (SOHO) user. My home fits this description to a tee, as my wife and I have a small business, have 5 computers sharing our network, and have been using a NAS for the last five years as a file server and to manage our backups. My first impression is that QNAP trimmed down size and capacity, but the speed, security, and features of the TS-259 Pro NAS server are all top ranked. Benchmark Reviews has tested a number of QNAP products: the QNAP TS-119 NAS single-disk offering made for home users, and the Goliath QNAP TS-809 Pro 8-Bay NAS for the storage needs of large businesses. Most recently we tested a 4-bay QNAP TS-459 Pro Turbo-NAS, which may yet turn out to be the best compromise for some people. Let's see how a two-bay device compares to its big brothers and little sisters.

The Most Affordable and Flexible Virtualization Solution

The TS-259 Pro is certified as compatible with VMware vSphere4 (ESX 4.0 and above) virtualization platform. The NAS can be utilized as the networked shared storage of VMware virtualization environments and Windows cluster servers. Comparing with traditional SAN (Storage Area Network), the Turbo NAS is a competitive alternative with much lower setup and maintenance costs in an IP SAN.

The Feature-rich and Integrated Applications for Business

The NAS supports file sharing across Windows, Mac, Linux, and UNIX platforms. Versatile business applications such as file server, FTP server, printer server, web server, and Windows AD support are provided. The dominant features, such as WebDAV, Share Folder Aggregation (also known as DFS), IPv6 and IPv4 dual-stack, Wake on LAN, schedule power on/ off, HDD S.M.A.R.T, comprehensive log systems, and policy-based unauthorized IP blocking are all included features of a QNAP NAS server.

About QNAP Systems, Inc.

QNAP Systems, Inc. (QNAP) is a devoted and dominant provider of Internet Appliance products. With our solid and integrated expertise in the Linux embedded platform, QNAP has released more than 30 models for the network storage and digital network surveillance series over the past 6 years, providing our consumers with high performance and high reliability storage, backup, and surveillance solutions. Today, QNAP continues to lead the industry with our innovation in design and technology.

Previous Page - Next Page >>