QNAP TS-659 Pro II Review
by Ganesh T S on September 19, 2011 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- IT Computing
- NAS
- QNAP
We took a look at the performance of the QNAP TS-659 Pro II in the configuration that it is most likely to be used in. It turns out to be a better performer than the LaCie 5big storage server unit that we reviewed last year in the same class.
There are a few quirks in the firmware, particularly with respect to the RAID rebuild. However, none of them are showstoppers. There are a few features such as one touch copy for the USB 3.0 port which could have made more sense for an eSATA port. USB 3.0 is a nice add-on feature, but we are not sure it is worth any additional price premium in the SMB / SOHO NAS market.
QNAP's marketing claims also hold up very well (except for the power consumption numbers which are kept low in the brochures by using 500 GB hard disks, and the rating of the internal PSU, which is 250W instead of the 350W claimed in the marketing brochure). Just like Synology, QNAP also has an exensive wiki system and very helpful forums.
All in all, the Atom D525 based QNAP TS-659 Pro II is the most powerful NAS we have reviewed so far, in terms of raw NASPT benchmark results as well as add-on features (both in terms of hardware as well as firmware). The TS-659 Pro+ has the same hardware specs as the TS-659 Pro II reviewed here (except for the two USB 3.0 ports). If the end-user scenario doesn't involve USB 3.0 devices, the former would turn out to be as good a choice as the TS-659 Pro II.
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jmelgaard - Monday, September 19, 2011 - link
I Use the PS3 Media Server instead of the built-in one to stream to a PS3.I must admit I have not tried streaming directly to my Sony DLNA enabled TV as I have gotten to use to using the PS3.
But it might be worth trying to see if it narrows the cases where the format is unsupported.
saiga6360 - Monday, September 19, 2011 - link
You will probably run into the same issue, which is really a Sony issue not supporting media formats. In which case, you will be stuck with a PC in between your storage and media player. As NAS hardware continue to upgrade to more powerful CPUs then maybe a better integrated DLNA media server can become possible.jmelgaard - Tuesday, September 20, 2011 - link
The point is that the PS3 has the same issue, many formats are unsupported by the PS3.The PS3 media server is therefore aimed to transcode unsupported medias to a format that the PS3 supports, so this should narrow the cases unless it chooses to transcode into a format that a TV does not support.
There is a bunch of settings for the various encoders, but to what degree you can control what is transcoded by default and what the output is I don't know.
jmelgaard - Tuesday, September 20, 2011 - link
Oh and the whole point of choosing the PS3 media server over any others was just that it already has a Pre-build QPKG for QNAP users making the installation a blizz...For other NAS types it's a different story.
jwcalla - Monday, September 19, 2011 - link
I'm somewhat surprised by the (relatively) poor NFS performance. Were the hard disks left in ext4 configuration or formatted to NTFS before the tests?ganeshts - Monday, September 19, 2011 - link
NFS performance could be improved by playing around with the mount options. We just tabulated the values at the default settings. The disks were in EXT4 only.Sivar - Monday, September 19, 2011 - link
A know of several businesses looking for something just like this. Your article was not only well-written and informative, you also have a clue about image formats so didn't use JPEG, which is horribly inefficient for screen shots like the ones in the article.SeeManRun - Monday, September 19, 2011 - link
Hi Ganesh,I read the article as I am very interested in getting a NAS or building my own. One thing that appears to be a limit for all of these machines is the speed at which you can transfer data from them. It seems to me with dual gigabit ethernet ports bonded, you should be able to see above 110 megabytes per second. I have read on smallnetbuilder that almost no NAS can get above this limit. Do you happen to know why, or care to explore this?
Thanks
tbutler - Monday, September 19, 2011 - link
Question that wasn't answered in the review: are the eSATA ports on this box compatible with port multipliers?ganeshts - Monday, September 19, 2011 - link
Thanks for bringing this to my attention.I just checked it out myself and am able to confirm that the eSATA ports are compatible with port multipliers.