QNAP's TS-EC1279U-RP 12-bay Flagship Rackmount NAS Review
by Ganesh T S on April 29, 2013 4:30 PM EST- Posted in
- Enterprise
- Storage
- NAS
- QNAP
Miscellaneous Factors and Final Words
The QNAP TS-EC1279U-RP is a 12-bay NAS, and there are many applicable disk configurations (JBOD / RAID-0 / RAID-1 / RAID-5 / RAID-6 / RAID-10). Most users looking for a balance between performance and redundancy are going to choose RAID-5. Hence, we performed all our expansion / rebuild duration testing as well as power consumption recording with the unit configured in RAID-5 mode. The disks used for benchmarking (OCZ Vector 120 GB) were also used in this section. The table below presents the average power consumption of the unit as well as time taken for various RAID-related activities.
| QNAP TS-EC1279U-RP RAID Expansion and Rebuild / Power Consumption | ||||
| Activity |
Duration (HH:MM:SS) |
Power Consumption (Outlet 1 / W) | Power Consumption (Outlet 2 / W) | Avg. Power Consumption (W) |
| Diskless | 40.95 | 50.51 | 91.46 | |
| Single Disk Initialization | 43.48 | 53.71 | 97.19 | |
| RAID-0 to RAID-1 (116 GB to 116 GB / 1 to 2 Drives) | 00:12:41 | 44.99 | 54.22 | 99.21 |
| RAID-1 to RAID-5 (116 GB to 233 GB / 2 to 3 Drives) | 00:25:27 | 44.95 | 54.03 | 98.98 |
| RAID-5 Expansion (233 GB to 350 GB / 3 to 4 Drives) | 00:41:42 |
46.56 |
55.56 |
102.12 |
| RAID-5 Expansion (350 GB to 467 GB / 4 to 5 Drives) | 00:40:51 |
48.63 |
57.87 |
106.5 |
| RAID-5 Expansion (467 GB to 584 GB / 5 to 6 Drives) | 00:37:23 |
50.58 |
60.1 |
110.68 |
| RAID-5 Expansion (584 GB to 700 GB / 6 to 7 Drives) | 00:40:39 |
51.81 |
61.72 |
113.53 |
| RAID-5 Expansion (700 GB to 817 GB / 7 to 8 Drives) | 00:36:41 |
52.8 |
62.82 |
115.62 |
| RAID-5 Expansion (817 GB to 934 GB / 8 to 9 Drives) | 00:41:33 |
55.03 |
64.24 |
119.27 |
| RAID-5 Expansion (934 GB to 1051 GB / 9 to 10 Drives) | 00:42:17 |
57.66 |
65.39 |
123.05 |
| RAID-5 Expansion (1051 GB to 1168 GB / 10 to 11 Drives) | 00:42:34 |
60.44 |
66.7 |
127.14 |
| RAID-5 Expansion (1168 GB to 1285 GB / 11 to 12 Drives) | 00:44:23 |
61.72 |
67.49 |
129.21 |
| RAID-5 Rebuild (1168 GB to 1285 GB / 11 to 12 drives) | 00:22:31 |
58.47 |
65.13 |
123.6 |
Unlike Atom-based units, RAID expansion and rebuild don't seem to take progressively longer as the number of disks increase. Coming to the business end of the review, the pros and cons of the unit must be analyzed while keeping in mind that the unit comes in at less than $5000.
Pros:
- High end features such as ECC RAM for mission critical environments
- Upgradable with 10G network cards
- Minimal performance hit when encryption is enabled
- Affordable price tag considering available feature set
Cons:
- Firmware and UI need rework and updates for usability and feature set parity with competing NAS vendors (Eg.: Automatic RAID level management / Disks can't be shared across multiple volumes / Encryption can only be on a per-volume basis and not on a per-folder basis etc.)
- Target market for this unit may find a CLI (command line interface) guide useful
- Firmware releases should go through more QA.
The last point was triggered by a new firmware update[ 3.8.2 Build 20130301 ] which we installed just as the review was about to go live. We tried to do some volume expansion experiments, but the unit became unresponsive twice during the process. We didn't encounter any such issues with the previous firmware release [ 3.8.1 Build 1205 ]. Strangely, the new firmware update got pushed through the NAS web UI, but, is not available yet on QNAP's website. I am willing to cut QNAP some slack here, but, definitely, the firmware QA must be improved. On the hardware side, the unit could also do with some noise dampening (the fans run without modulation during the startup sequence, but that is probably not much of a deal when the unit is placed in a server room).
In closing, the balance of feature set and price tips the recommendation in QNAP's favour. More stable firmware would make the deal for prospective consumers even sweeter.
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23 Comments
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Evadman - Wednesday, May 1, 2013 - link
Why is this so expensive for the performance, and why is single client performance so bad? Granted I deal with actual enterpise class SAN devices from EMC and the like, but even my ~4 year old personal server can beat this box. My crappy home server is a 20 rotational Hitachi 3 TB GST Deskstar 0S03230 disks in RAID 60, a E5200 CPU and an Adaptec 52445 running on MS Server 2008, not even close to being decent for enterprise level. Besides the disks, it cost under a grand and will max out a quadlinked 4gbps connection with one client, I don't need to add 3 or 4 as your graphs show that this box needs. There is no excuse for a 20 rotational disk device to beat this 12 disk SSD NAS/SAN before hitting the network limit. I should get a dozen SSD's and a 10 gig switch and see what my crappy box can do just for kicks. *makes notes to see if a spare switch can be found in the office*ganeshts - Wednesday, May 1, 2013 - link
The single client performance is for a single client with a 1 GbE link (so it can't max out a 4GbE link obviously). Client machines usually have only a single GbE port.Our multi-client graphs show performance with multiple clients and indicate limitation because of the network link bandwidth on the NAS side
Evadman - Thursday, May 2, 2013 - link
I must be misreading the graphs being presented then. This real world graph: http://images.anandtech.com/doci/6922/qnap_ts1279u... shows 5 clients, each at ~20MB/s for a total of 80 MB/s. Theoretical maximum is 125 MB/s, Adding the control data to the payload of the frame, and you should have about 97.5% data. So it looks like it taking more than 5 clients to get to the 1gbps limit. On the single client CIFS graph here: http://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph6922/54437... only 2 of the performance benchmarks appear network limited at 123 MB/s. Office Productivity is low at 25-28 MB/s, as that is probably what a small business is going to be doing the most of. Is this a client/CIFS issue and not a NAS/SAN issue?