Specifications

The heart of the TP-419P II is a Marvell CPU running at 2.0 GHz. This processor utilizes the ARM instruction set and has a single core, so we expect it to be the bottlenecked at heavy throughput. On the other hand the available memory of 512 MB will be fine for the embedded Linux that this device uses.

Up to four HDDs, 3.5" or 2.5", can be installed and the newer SATA III protocol is not supported. However SATA III, unlike to SSDs, practically doesn't have anything more to offer to mechanical disks, compared to SATA II.
Before you buy the HDDs for the NAS you better take a look at the QNAP HDD compatibility list, since some HDDs are not compatible with the TS-419P II. Also according to this post at QNAP's forum, all WD desktop drives (Green/Blue/Black) are not recommended since they cause the following consequences:

• Slow performance
• Disk drop out from RAID easily
• Read/write error on file system

Regarding network connectivity the device is equipped with two Gigabit ports which can be linked together (port trunking), but in order to exploit port trunking you must have a suitable switch that supports the Link Aggregation Control Protocol (LACP). The same applies to Jumbo frames, too. You should enable packets with more than 1500 bytes length only if your whole infrastructure supports them and also you should configure the MTU value of your clients accordingly.
In total the TS-419P II is equipped with four USB 2.0 ports (one on the front and the rest are located on the rear side) and two eSATA ones. Unfortunately there are no USB 3.0 ports so you better connect your external disks via eSATA for maximum throughput.
The unit is equipped with a two-line LCD display which shows useful messages about the NAS device (e.g. the network IP address) and through it you can also perform some basic administrative tasks.

The NAS has pretty compact dimensions and actually the HDD compartment occupies most of its internal space. Its weight is restricted to 3 kg without the HDDs installed of course. Regarding its energy consumption QNAP states that at sleep mode it needs only 13W and in operation it consumes 26W. During our tests we will verify if these numbers stand, since we will use four 500 GB HDDs; the same number and capacity HDDs QNAP used to extract the above readings.
With a specified 35.6 dB noise at standby and a little more during operation the NAS is relatively quiet, although not so quiet as many users would like it to be. During our test sessions we will conduct some noise measurements, too to verify if the given noise output numbers are close to the real ones.

The TS-419P II uses an external power brick, although it has space inside its casing to accommodate a SFF PSU. This power brick can deliver up to 8A at +12V so the NAS along with the installed HDDs has 96W at their disposal. We think that this is a sufficient power level for any case.

Finally the warranty of the device is set to only two years and to speak frankly we expected a much longer warranty for such a high cost device. However a NAS is supposed to work 24/7 so two years of its lifetime is equal to 2-3 times more for other devices that work only 8-10 hours per day. With this in mind the two year warranty doesn't look so bad.