QNAP TS-659 Pro II Review
by Ganesh T S on September 19, 2011 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- IT Computing
- NAS
- QNAP
The host silicon in the SMB / SOHO NAS market is primarily from two players. While the low end is dominated by Marvell, the high end is dominated by Intel's Atom processors. As one goes higher, we have even more powerful Intel CPUs (such as the low end Core i3s). Freescale used to have some design wins till 2009 with their PPC based processors, but we haven't seen any units based on their processors in their last two years.
Removing the drive bays of the TS-659 Pro II reveals an array of 6 SATA slots and a couple of Marvell 88SE9125 chips [PDF]. These are SATA to PCI-E bridges, with support for 2 SATA devices. We believe another of these bridge chips must be present on the other side of the SATA slots array. This array connects to the PCI-E bus on the ICH9 southbridge.
Most of the high end SMB / SOHO NAS units have 1 GB of RAM which can be expanded. The TS-659 Pro II also has 1 GB of RAM expandable to 3 GB. In order to install this notebook memory, one needs to open up the unit. The brushed steel top can be removed by taking off the screws at the rear end and sliding the top out. The motherboard is covered by a screwed on plastic film with a flap above the SODIMM slot where the user can put in the additional memory.
The rest of the components are not easily accessible, but we did manage to grab a snap of the Renesas-NEC 720200 USB 3.0 to PCI-E bridge which enables the two USB 3.0 ports on the unit. The iTE IT8721F is the hardware monitor sensor and fan control chip.
In the next section, we will have the testing methodology outlined and also a description of the testbed.
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Sivar - Tuesday, September 20, 2011 - link
This is always a good point to bring up. The mantra on StorageReview.com has long been, "RAID is for uptime. Backups are for disaster recovery."Visual - Monday, September 19, 2011 - link
How quiet is this thing?The only reason I would go for something like this is if it is really quieter than any file server I can build myself. It will need to be literally inaudible running 24/7 in my living room or else it will annoy me to hell some night when I decide to sleep on the sofa.
And what are the chances for mods adding torrent clients, web/db server and other gizmos to the OS without complete wipe, keeping the current admin interface for the RAID itself?
ganeshts - Monday, September 19, 2011 - link
Very quiet during periods of sporadic data access. But, putting it through the NASPT benchmarks would cause it to whirr up and create a ruckus of sorts for some time (Around 2 - 3 minutes) before going back to the quiet period again. This would would repeat every 5 minutes or so. This is what one expects when there are 3 fans in the system in such a small enclosure.Final word on noise: If you are sensitive to it, don't buy it.. I think the main target of this system is at enterprise and SMB/SOHO users who don't care about noise / keep the NAS in a server room.
bobbozzo - Tuesday, September 20, 2011 - link
At least some of their models seem to support bittorrent:http://www.qnap.com/faq_detail.asp?faq_id=547
chris1317 - Monday, September 19, 2011 - link
Thanks for the review. I have been using a QNAP 509 Pro for a few years now and it is a great performer. I have been looking for an upgrade though.It would be good if you could get a hold of the newly released models TS-879 or TS-1079. They support 10 GbE which I am really interested in.
Also its worth pointing out about the limitations of raid5 with regard to the unrecoverable read error during rebuild that can present itself and result in a loss of data http://www.zdnet.com/blog/storage/why-raid-5-stops... which is why I want to go for a larger model. Allthough these models support raid 6 its tough to sacrafice 2 drives out 6 (5 in my case) for parity.
DanNeely - Monday, September 19, 2011 - link
With the $1k price premium (859 vs 879), several hundred dollars/computer for 10GB cards, and >$10k price for a 10GB router; I'm not sure if 10GB hardware really qualifies for the small office yet.chris1317 - Monday, September 19, 2011 - link
lol, its for my house :) I like my gadgets, I do worry about the URE problem though.DanNeely - Monday, September 19, 2011 - link
URE?chris1317 - Monday, September 19, 2011 - link
URE (unrecoverable read error) from the article that I linked to in my first post. With drive size increasing there is going to become increasingly likely that when a drive fails and a rebuild is in progress that a seccond drive will experience an unrecoverable read error bricking the raid. The article points out that a 7 drive RAID 5 with 1 TB disks has a 50% chance of a rebuild failure due to ure with a standard 10-14 manufacturer spec for failure. Higher spec drives are available and Raid 6 helps with this as it has a 2 drive redundancy.Spazweasel - Monday, September 19, 2011 - link
Very true about reconstruction issues. RAID rebuilding hammers a drive like little else can.Fortunately, the reviewed NAS supports RAID6, as well as RAID5 + hot spare and RAID6 + hot spare.