QNAP TS-859 Pro

[Darksaber]

To read this review go to: http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/QNAP/TS-859_Pro/

[Easy Rhino]

nice review. too bad we couldnt see some real world testing. i wish i had the money for that cause it would make an epic cloud!

[Phxprovost]

this is why i dont understand premade NAS systems, your telling me its ~1200 Euros...for a metal box....with an atom board inside?

[Easy Rhino]

Originally Posted by Phxprovost

this is why i dont understand premade NAS systems, your telling me its ~1200 Euros...for a metal box....with an atom board inside?

the raid hardware is expensive and the software is also fairly advanced.

[chr0nos]

Originally Posted by Easy Rhino

the raid hardware is expensive and the software is also fairly advanced.

Software RAID FTL

I can't really justify the price tag for an atom based hardware, besides you can do pretty much the same with open source software with half the cost if not less.

[Easy Rhino]

Originally Posted by chr0nos

Software RAID FTL

I can't really justify the price tag for an atom based hardware, besides you can do pretty much the same with open source software with half the cost if not less.

it is not software raid. it is hardware raid and the software to run all the other apps also costs in development.

[newtekie1]

It is software RAID, there is no hardware RAID controller included, that is mentioned in the review.

And the software that they provide is pretty useless. Why have a built in media player that needs to transcode all my media? I'll just stream the original file over the network and watch it in the media player of my choice. -Free

But I can use it to watch videos on my PS3/Xbox360. Tversity does that. -Free

A photo viewing app, nice, off cource I can just access the files over the network and use my better photo viewing app on my computer. -Free

A file manger...yeah its called Explorer... -Free

Built in bittorrent app? Big deal, utorrent does that, and provides a web interface so I can use it from any computer. -Free

This device is just overpriced, no doubt about it. The software, while it might have cost them to develope, has free and easy alternatives available, so QNAP isn't providing any value with the software. And for $1200 the least they could have done is throw in an 80GB 2.5" drive so you can install a real OS if you wanted, but for $1200 I would expect an decent sized SSD actually.

[Easy Rhino]

ha. you are right, it is software raid. i guess i figured it had to be hardware raid to justify the price

still, if you add up all of the costs of the materials to make the case, the hot swappable bays, the led indicators, the intel atom chipset/mobo/ram it would still come out to around $800 if you were to build one yourself. heck, a full tower server case costs $300-$400 alone.

[Darksaber]

Sure you can do software raid on an ITX board + 4 Port Controller card = 8 ports. But how about dual Gigabit NIC? Not going to happen as there is simply no space left for an expansion card.

Besides all the hardware features, set up Linux, get software raid up and running, all the different applications, get the running ALL the time with ALL of them accessible at the same time, add user access control, all within a package consuming a mere 90W on load. Not going to happen.

You have to see the grand theme of things. Sure, hardware wise you could build an equivalent mashine yourself, but not ITX and not with a power consumption of less than 100W and no were as compact.

[Easy Rhino]

Originally Posted by Darksaber

Sure you can do software raid on an ITX board + 4 Port Controller card = 8 ports. But how about dual Gigabit NIC? Not going to happen as there is simply no space left for an expansion card.

Besides all the hardware features, set up Linux, get software raid up and running, all the different applications, get the running ALL the time with ALL of them accessible at the same time, add user access control, all within a package consuming a mere 90W on load. Not going to happen.

You have to see the grand theme of things. Sure, hardware wise you could build an equivalent mashine yourself, but not ITX and not with a power consumption of less than 100W and no were as compact.

yea and considering this is targeting small businesses which most do not have any in house IT expertise to build their own storage tower.

[Scrizz]

Darksaber
Page 7

Another run of ATTO did yield slightly lower numbers during teh rebuild process

[docfranz]

Just to give anyone else looking for this information a better idea. Here are a couple of things I discovered after I purchased this that aren't mentioned anywhere online. We bought 2 of these to mirror each other we have 8 x 3TB drives (seagate).

1) The file share structure blows - IE: you cannot have sub-directories shared to different users/groups than the parent share. The kerberos (ADS windows domain) integrations works but is crap, reboots drop the domain controller you have to put your password back in to reconnect, you can either have a group or users listed as members of a share if connected to a domain, but not both at the same time, the qnap frequently forgets the UUID of users on the domain. In conclusion: don't attempt to get this going on a windows domain controller and expect anything less than a paper weight. The overall software configuration blows. The qnap runs it own native version of linux, don't know the distro base. However since the 859 has VGA and usb you can plug a monitor in and watch it boot, since it is just an x86 computer. Doing this I was able to access linux console, so I promptly went around setting up proper samba by raw editing samba.conf in command line... this worked great (for a bit -we'll get to that) so everything is going swimmingly after the samba edit have non-shitty file sharing nested directories for shares (the native web-interface doesn't allow), so then I reboot the thing... and discover that apparently qnap stores (somewhere I couldn't find) a hash of the base config files in their last known "good" state -that being the state that qnap webconsole configured them in. If it detects on reboot the hash doesn't make it has a shadow copy -somewhere. That it overwrites the file with so that it returns it to it's expected hash. Nice from a backup idea terrible if you are editing the files manually. Every reboot you'd have to configure the thing all over again. Obviously that wasn't an option.

--- On to the ways to get around this:

- I first though, I'll wipe the internal flash memory and put linux on it, well you get 512 MB, debian with nothing barely fits (squeeze 6.0.3) you have approx 80 MB left, so then I thought well I'll just get a USB flash drive plug it in the back install "real" linux (debian squeeze) on it, run my own software raid and not have crappy shadow files overwriting my perfectly functional confs. This worked great except I happened to pick a flash drive that seems to have bad sectors, and besides it looks tachy sticking out the back.

I came across this site that had taken the qNAP apart: http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/QNAP/TS-859_Pro/ [page 4] inside pics

You'll see they are using a usb headered flash drive nice industrial version. For some reason they decided on 512 MB so that had to be changed.

Here is the site that sells these things after market: http://www.e-itx.com/apacer-udm2-plus-type-a.html

--- They use the TYPE A USB header in the qnap 859, I was unable to tell if they use the normal temperature or extended temp. I purchased the normal temp as that is all the supplier said they could get at the time.

They [e-itx.com] basically just calls up apacer and orders one. They aren't cheap (as flash memory goes) but 1) they work, 2) they are the exact form factor, 3) same company, 4) now I can run linux on this thing with plenty of free space for linux extras (samba , tftpserver, ftp, etc) without worry that I only have 80 MB free.
(Base debian with some nice packages is approx 1.3 GB so I got the 4 GB one ... plenty of space now.)

Anyway, as a recommendation, do this, the form factor of the qnap is great, the transfer speeds over network are in the 100-120MB/s (capping Gigabit), just get rid of their terrible software install some real linux and you'll have yourself a nice machine.


--- Extra notes: I did try other OS distros geared toward NASes (FreeNAS, OPENfiler,etc) the problem with these was they all were someone limited in other general linux stuff without some compile from source, and they kind of take over the system and make it a little black box.

---- One note, with regular debian installed it detects all the hard drives however it doesn't seem to control the hdd lights correctly as only 4 (the 4 on the right of the device are on, the others are off but this is no way affects the ability for the OS to see the drives or use them in RAID or alone.)


-- Long post but no one has seemed to compile this information anywhere. So I thought I'd write it does as it has been about 2 months of work dealing with this.

[docfranz]

http://www.e-itx.com/apacer-udm2-plus-type-a.html

You can buy larger HDD internal for this thing here: