Qnap TS-469 Pro TurboNas

Qnap's network attached storage (NAS) drive occupies an essential niche situated between consumer and business NAS offerings.? Its integration with Windows Active Directory fit the latter, while a more user-friendly interface and lower price point align it with consumer NASes. The TS-469 Pro TurboNAS is a good fit for a business professional running a home office or small business network, because it provides easy management of shared data and USB devices on a small network and very good disk failure recovery. Even better, improvements have come to features that fell short the last time I reviewed? a similar QNAP NAS. But an issue with this NAS remains: compared with similar devices targeting SMBs, the TS-469's Read/Write performance is a bit sluggish.?

Specs
The TS-469 is an expandable NAS with four drive bays. The front panel features a USB port for performing quick copy jobs of data from the NAS to a USB drive with just a touch. There's also a toggle button to navigate the LCD menu on the front of the device. The LCD displays information such as the boot process during device startup, as well as TCP/IP information, hostname, and volume status.

Qnap has bumped up the processor from the Intel Atom dual-core 1.66 GHz model in its TS-459 NAS, which first shipped about two years ago, to Intel's Atom 2.13 GHz dual-core processor. While the newer processor provides better reads and writes in the TS-469 over the TS-459, it still doesn't match performance of some competing NAS devices for SMBs. More on that in the performance section, though.

The device ships with 1GB RAM, expandable to 3GB. Qnap provides plenty of other expansion options, too: There are two USB 3.0 ports and four USB 2.0 ports on the rear panel, as well as an HDMI port, dual Gigabit Ethernet ports, and a pair of eSATA ports.

The front panel has yet another USB port; this one is for attaching an external drive to send a quick copy job to the drive just by clicking the "Copy" button above the port. The copy job set up is configured through the NAS's interface. The other USB ports can support printers, pen drives, hubs, UPSs and more.

The drive trays are lockable and easy to work with when you're replacing drives. The four drive bays can support 3.5-inch SATA 6GBps, SATA 3GBps, 2.5-inch SATA, or SSD hard drives. While drives are hot-swappable (which worked well in testing), you do need to get hard drives on your own, as the NAS ships diskless.

Connecting to the Network
The NAS ships with a CD including a quick installation guide (a hard copy of this guide is also included in the packaging), the QNAP Finder (an app used to locate a QNAP NAS on a network), a few more applications for remote access and backup, and the user manual.

You can use the QNAP Finder app to detect the NAS once it's connected, and get into its interface for setup. Alternatively, once the NAS is on the network, you can just browse to its IP address to access the interface.

Once you have the drives installed, the rest of setup consists of nothing more than physically connecting the NAS to your network and browsing to the management software via its IP address to configure the device.

Management and Features
The interface design has not changed much since I last looked at the TS-459. The TS-469's, like the TS-459's, is detailed and well-designed. The software has improved, however. The most noticeable improvement is a big one involving firmware upgrading.

Upgrading firmware on the TS-459 proved problematic; after downloading the firmware, the system seemed to have a problem actually installing the new firmware automatically.
The firmware upgrade and install process happened automatically in the TS-469. As soon as I opened the management interface for the first time, a new firmware upgrade was detected, downloaded and applied without requiring any intervention on my part.

The TS-469 provides a mixture of consumer and small business features. From the interface, you can manage the NAS as well as set up a RAID?the device supports RAID 0, 1, 5, 5+hot spare, 6, single, and JBOD. Business features include encrypting disk volumes for security, support for iSCSI targeting, and integration with Windows Active Directory. Consumer features include support as a media or iTunes server, and apps for video and photo sharing. The TS-469 can also serve as an IP camera surveillance station for a home or small business office.

Qnap offers its MyCloudNAS service for remote management of and access to the TS-469. This is a feature I've tested in the TS-459 device, and while there is still an issue with auto-configuring a router to support remote access to the NAS, the overall process has been streamlined a bit to make setting up MyCloudNAS a little easier with the TS-469.

There are two options for deploying MyCloudNAS: express or manual setup. The express setup is the easiest option: give the NAS a name. The MyCloudNAS service is checked to ensure the name you give isn't in use. You can then check off the services you want to remotely access via the NAS. For example, you can enable remote access of the web server service (used if you are running a web site from the NAS) or the photo station service, which will allow photo sharing of images stored on the NAS from anywhere.

To establish remote access, connections from the Internet to the NAS have to be allowed. This is done by setting up port forwarding rules on the router that's part of the same network the NAS is connected to. QNAP's software is designed to automatically set up port forwarding rules on the router (as long as the router is supported).

Automatic port-forwarding did not work on my network when I tested the older TS-459. However, this time around, I saw in my router's software that the TS-469 did manage to successfully setup port forwarding rules on my router. The only rules it couldn't set up were those for ports I already had a port-forwarding rule configured for, which makes sense. It would be better if the QNAP software could see that you had a rule set up on a port it needed to configure and then prompt you for further actions, but at least it was able to create some of the rules needed.

Setting up the MyCloudNAS service and auto-configuring the router to allow remote access to the NAS is still not as streamlined a process as it should be, although it's better with QNAP's updated firmware. Between the setup wizard, and the diagnostics available in both the TS-469's auto router configuration screen and your router software, you have the tools available to determine what the issue is if the TS-469 auto configure wizard can't create all of the rules it needs to allow remote access. While most NASes require you to tweak any needed router settings yourself, another NAS that does auto-configure the router,
LG's?Super Multi N2A2?NAS , did a better job of router configuration in testing.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ziffdavis/pcmag/~3/e7Q8J7Lhv8M/0,2817,2409807,00.asp

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