The house of Terabytes
Watch out, fellow nerds. We're not the only ones with more than one PC any more. In the modern home, it's not uncommon for there to be at least two PCs, particularly where there are quarreling children involved.
And with multimedia technologies starting to mature (it's taken long enough, hasn't it?), the average number of computers in the home continues to grow.
Perhaps a more interesting metric than PC count, however, is the amount of storage we possess. Take the storage on your person right now. Maybe a couple of GB from the SD card in your phone? What about that 30GB iPod? Suits you, sir.
That's the storage within the confines of your pockets covered. Now let's run through the house.
'x' number of PCs, with 'y' GB of storage on each, on average - depending on how geeky you are - you'll get either a figure that makes you go "woah, that's a lot" or "never enough!" (I get over 2TB, ignoring testing gear).
If that's what storage is like in the home, imagine the storage in an office, even a small one of five-to-ten people.
And as the number of storage devices grows, so too does the chance that one of them is going to go tits up.
But, with data that's duplicated centrally, the worries are less. Happily, such an arrangement is no longer the preserve of the corporate network. It's available to the smallest office and to home users, too.
Regular HEXITES will be familiar with the network-attached storage (NAS) devices we've already reviewed.
Today, though, we're taking our first look at such a product from QNAP. Let's see what kind of twist the company can put on its NAS offering, shall we?
QNAP TS-109 Pro
QNAP produces surveillance products and a range of storage solutions from small personal devices, through to rack-mountable arrays.
The TS-109 Pro NAS box – SRP £170 (inc VAT) - sits somewhere in the middle. It's a single-drive device aimed at small and medium-sized businesses and has a features-set that, on paper, is better even than for some of its multi-drive competitors.
There's also a non-Pro TS-109, pitched at £20-30 less. This is aimed at the home and lacks a few of the features that business users might require.
According to the spec sheets, the hardware for each version is identical; only the supplied software is different. That's an interesting thing to know, given the openness of the system, as we'll see in due course.
Here's a run-down of the important specifications:
| Feature | Details |
|---|---|
| CPU | Marvell 5182 (ARM926EJ-S) |
| Memory | 128MiB DDR-2 |
| HDD support | Single SATA internal drive, up to 1TB Single eSATA external drive, up to 1TB |
| Networking | 1x GigE Protocols/features: TCP/IP, DHCP Client, DHCP Server, CIFS/SMB, AFP, NFS, HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, DDNS, NTP, Jumbo Frame, Active Directory |
| Filesystems | Ext-3 for internal/external drives FAT for external drives NTFS read-only for external drives |
| USB | 3x USB ports supporting printers, cameras, hubs and mass storage devices. Auto-copy button for backup of USB drives. |
| Dimensions | 210(D) x 60(W) x 182(H) mm |
| Thermals | Passive, aluminium enclosure dissipates heat |
| Security (physical) | Kensington lock slot |
| Software features | E-mail alert SMTP Auto power on after power loss Network recycle bin Apache web server MySQL server PHP Remote replication Q-RAID 1 disk backup UPnP media server Photo server Multimedia server iTunes server Download server |
We've tried to condense the important features down into the above table, but for the whole shebang, hit the QNAP website.
So, quite a big list of features, along with a few interesting hardware details.
We've not had an ARM-powered NAS in the labs before and the DDR-2 memory is a NAS novelty, too. However, clock speed (333MHz (500MHz according to QNAP)) and on-board memory (128MiB) are in-line with what we've seen before. Supported hardware is what we'd expect too, given that this system is, like many others, Linux-based.
Of course, it's the Linux OS that underlies the lengthy list of software features. There are a number of familiar items in the list but this is the first time HEXUS has seen PHP and MySQL on a NAS box.
Given the target market of the TS-109 (Pro), we reckon it's a clever move to put them in there. The question is, will the TS-109 Pro take a performance hit as a result?
Before we investigate performance, let's get hands-on with the hardware.
