Installation

You screw a metal caddy to the harddisks before you slide them into the TS-209 Pro.


Changes to the installed drives can be done while the unit is turned on since the slots are fully hotswappable. This also prevents downtime from a failing disk when using RAID1.


To assist you with installation the manual unfolds into a huge sheet covering basic installation.




Installation is done via the QNAP finder, just like most QNAP products. The finder will locate the QNAP NAS device on the network and then allows you to do a basic setup. It will let you change the device's name, set up the harddisk(s) - basically makes the device work.


The setup asks for standard settings like time and network settings. After that the drive(s) have to be initialized. You can choose between RAID 0, 1 and JBOD. Additionally you can choose not to use RAID. For our tests I mainly used RAID 1. Everything will look the same and during benchmarks there won't be a difference due to network limitations.
After drive initialization a firmware image is asked, select the one you want and never look back at these settings again, unless of course you require some firmware update.

Services

Most of the services featured are identical to the earlier reviewed TS-109 pro, therefor I skipped most. The list is very long and suits the needs of about any home or small business user.


As you can see everything can be setup from the web interface. It pretty much explains itself. You can enable/disable services and each page contains a few handy options for the service.

For a list of services check out the TS-109 review.

The only real difference are the RAID options, which allow you to redefine the array. The complete list of services is quite impressive yet still easy to overlook.