I’ve had TS-219P+ for more than a year – but I had to leave it at my mother’s house when I moved to Stockholm. She really liked the TimeMachine backups, the photo library and the music collection and just wouldn’t let me take the box
So I got myself a new TS-259Pro+ about two months ago.
Dimensions are really small for such powerful device – just look at these size comparisons to a credit card.
The company positions its products as professional, so the model naming system is not particularly friendly
I am sure that all these numbers mean something, but probably only first digit matters for home users. It shows a number of hard disk bays (In TS-259P+ there are 2 of them). I doubt that anyone would need more bays for home or small office use, but QNAP has devices with up to 16 bays. 59 and 69 models feature 2 Ethernet-interfaces and a VGA output. External power adapter is a smart solution as it helps keep the temperature down. If you run a cluster of devices, it would also help you lower the maintenance cost (you can use rack 12V DC converter and power all devices from a single point).
Before I got QNAP, I had several external disks and it often took some time to find the data I need. It’s getting slightly better now, but still there are few portable drives larger than 500GB. That was more than enough a couple of years ago, but with the lossless audio and HD video we have today it’s just ridiculous. Writing speed and fragmentation are also a concern after a couple of months of use. But more importantly, there is no universal file system for different machines. Once we got files over 4 Gigs, we just can’t normally use a hard drive across several PCs, Macs and some home electronics as a TV. Not having a hard disk handy when I was at the office or travelling was also a problem. QNAP solved all these problems – I can access my files from wherever I want and get the best speed with any file system (it uses AFP when sharing files with Mac and Samba with Windows machines). I can also log on to the QNAP from any location and download the files I need. Two 4TB drives in my TS-259Pro+ work in RAID 1 (mirror) mode, and even if one of them fails, I will still have my data. Built-in antivirus scans all downloaded files not eating up your laptop’s resources.
There’s a use for all my HDD’s as well: I plugged them to QNAP and it sync some of my folders to external drives. Once I go somewhere, I just get the external drives with the last season of my favorite show with me.
The list of built-in features is extensive, you’d hardly use everything even in the production environment. There are things such as iTunes server, home media server, TimeMachine (which works faster than Apple’s!), VPN server. A nice bonus comes with the built-in VPN (both PPTP and OpenVPN): you don’t have need to pay for a VPN account when surfing on unencrypted networks – just use your own VPN server. Saves at least 10 EUR/month.
Thanks to a powerful processor (2-core Intel Atom D525), TS-259Pro+ stays responsive even when downloading torrents with 10 megabytes/second.
It also syncs my Dropbox account and makes daily backups of it.
The QNAP is very quiet and it was working 24/7 in the small student studio, and I had no problems falling asleep. However, during a recent cleaning I’ve found a niche where the “elskåp” is located and realized that I can place my QNAP there. Take a look:
In my opinion, the coolest thing about QNAP is a QPKG system – you can easily install extra apps, such as torrent clients, photo libraries, content-management systems for your websites, mail server and many, many more. There is a big community where you can download even more apps – it’s as easy as on an iPhone or iPad. But all the apps for QNAP come free
For those of you familiar with Linux, you can use IPKG and other utilities. You can host a number of websites with PHP and MySQL. It’s a good tool if you are a developer and want to test your code before uploading it to the hosting. But even if “command line” scares you, you shouldn’t worry – most features could be set through a friendly web-interface. You can try a demo interface on QNAP website (http://web.qnap.com/liveDemo.asp).APPS: QNAP has 3 iOS apps for its devices: Qmobile, Qfile and Qmanager. All these apps are free. Qmobile and Qfile let you remotely browse your files. You can even create a local copy of a movie or song on your device so you can watch it when you don’t have a fast connection – for example, I a gym or an airplane. You can also synchronize documents. Qmanager is the most interesting app of the bundle, as it lets you remotely monitor the state of the device and change almost any setting. You get the full list of processes, online users, device temperature and many more – just look at these screenshots. Apps are very well-designed, the only thing missing is an index bar (it take some time to find a file among others), but I’m sure QNAP will fix this. Here are some screenshots with most interesting features:
Well, that’s pretty much it. I’m starting a career as an IT consultant and I would definitely recommend QNAP devices to demanding home users and small/mid-sized companies. If you’re small, you can save on expensive server operating system and hardware and get decent network with QNAP and a router. If you already have an infrastructure, you can easily integrate QNAP products into it and save yourself time on setting up customized servers. As a network administrator, you don’t have to worry about updates – they all come pre-tested and are installed with one click.
For home users with regular needs, getting a QNAP product is also a good deal. Look: TS-112 model (1239 SEK on Webhallen.com) costs less than 3TB Apple Time Capsule (4395 SEK) and gives you 3 times more features. Yes, you have to add HDD (say, 1500 kr for a good 3TB drives) and a router (around 500 SEK), but you get much more than TimeCapsule and save more than a thousand kronor, or about a 100 euros (1 EUR is around 8.3 SEK).