Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)Before I say anything, I'll be clear that the reason this item did not get 5 stars is because of the price.
A long whiles back, I acquired the ever faithful Qnap 409Turbo Pro 4 bay unit that has served quite well over its life until now. Loaded with 4 1tb drives, it continued to work and fulfill its purpose well.
As time went by, I needed more space and realized that the 409 was great for moderate amount of file transfer and limited to how many could access the unit at once. It simply was operated best when only one or possibly two tasks were being done with it.
After careful research, I opted for the slower, cooler and greener drives with capacity of 2tb each for a new NAS.
After careful consideration, reading reviews including those at SmallNetBuilders, I narrowed my choice down to the Synology 1010, QNAP 639 and one of the variant of the Thecus 7700. With closer review, I found that the QNAP was capable in its 5 bay model of excellent speed and ability to add drives if needed, externally.
The QNAP TS-559pro fitted with 5 Samsung 2tb 5400 rpm drives became the new NAS to serve my needs. This unit has a dual atom processor that outshines the little ARM processor in the 409 (I believe it is an ARM processor).
As I do lots of file transfers, usually over the RAM size of the unit, I found that both up and down speeds with FTP was nearly 10x that of 409pro. The 409 upload might yield an average of 8mbs while the 559 (even with the slower drives) was averaging around 80 or greater. This was amazing and a true time saver.
I fiddled with iSCSI with reasonable results but may work with it later to do time machine backups at a later date once I establish how I want to exploit the NAS entirely. I can say the iSCSI does work well for those interested in this feature.
The Web File Manager is a very nice front end but a caveat - if you have files larger than 2 gigs, it will not handle them. It only handles (at least in my experience) files up to 2 gigs. Thus, FTP or "drag and drop" fills the bill here instead.
Overall the Web based interface for the QNAP series is fairly easy to understand and navigate. This is even more so with a refresh of the firmware to the latest incarnation.
One challenge I have is I use Cyberpower UPS units for back up. QNAP doesn't recognize those and in turn, while the Cyberpower will go to battery mode during a black out, it wont turn off the QNAP. If you use APC based UPS units, they should work with the QNAP models including the TS-559pro.
Would I recommend this unit? Answer is if you have the money to burn you would probably appreciate this unit for its elegance, quiet operation, certainly the speed and the features found within.
Twonky Media player comes with the unit and I admit I had some issues with it. I elected to go with a download of the 4x version that was treated as an "add on/plug in" and it worked very well and couldn't be happier. This is a minor flaw to date that was easily remedied.
The advantage of these units is not just the clean sleek look, and many features but a thoughtful interface and a very active community that via forum help each other out when questions and problems arise. The latter is often missed by those purchasing computer related equipment or software and can be invaluable at times. The QNAP community is fairly friendly and certainly helpful.
The reason I went with the 559 vs 639 was the fact it was more powerful/faster and it will take some time for me to fill up the NAS which is set at RAID 5. That is 10 TB of total space and the usable space once raided is approx 7.7 TB. Understand that formatting the drive and also creating parody eats up one drive plus a small amount. This is acceptable to me. The downside of QNAP is they do not support 0+1 or 1+0 Raid scenarios or Raid 3. However, Raid 5 for most people is certainly a great compromise of speed and drive failure redundancy. RAIDED NAS is NOT a back up but good for data replication. I do admit I use it for both and willing to take the risk for the unit itself to fail and drives.
The Bottom line - if you have the bucks to burn, this is an excellent unit with excellent speed and features.
Click Here to see more reviews about: QNAP 5-Bay iSCSI Network Attached Storage SATA with 1 GB RAM Dual-LAN and Intel Pineview D510 1.66GHz Dual Core Processor TS-559 PRO
The TS-559 Pro is the powerful 5-bay network attached storage (NAS) server, which is designed to provide an affordable and easy-to-management solution with iSCSI service for virtualized and clustered environment.
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