Jasker

February 28, 2010 at 1:03pm

This is still a "Best of" ?  I find it hard to believe this device beats everything out there at todays standards. 

dmcarter

September 29, 2008 at 11:54am

When is Q-NAP going to build a real NAS Storage devive. I have been putting off the purchase because I am waitng for a NAS Box that has Raid 5 redundancy all in one enclosure. What is taking the manufacturers so long to put a real fast redindant NAS BOX together? All of us know it wil fly off the shelves when available!

 

Douglas M. Carter

CTO Nanexx

Earendil

January 20, 2008 at 10:31am

I have a TS-101 and it works similarly to all the TS NAS boxes. First I want to say it's awesome!

As for concernedTPro's questions have no fear. The largest HDD it can handle is 1 TB in each application. For example I currently have four 500 GB HDDs connected to my TS-101 and have had more. One is internal to the TS-101, one is connected to eSATA and is merely backup storage, one is connected to a USB 2.0 port and is mirroring the internal HDD through it's QRAID function and another is connected through the other USB port and USB hub for more storage capacity.

Qnap actively supports their products and the firmware releases prove this. Their support team actually answers questions but you'd have to take my word for this. I suspect the 1 TB limit is due to today's drive sizes and HDD formatting limitations.

As for the NAS/NAD debate, this is much closer to the NAS end of the spectrum. The amount of work it does and the ability of this product as seen in it's user manual is huge. Even I am not using it all, YET! Out of the 9 things it does I use 6 of them.

ggerke

November 27, 2007 at 6:20pm

:quote:
When one thinks of a NAS, you think of a device that can hold multiple hard drives. From the picture, and the description on qnap's site, it looks like this can only hold one drive. So, it is a very fast external hard drive enclosure, not a NAS.
:unquote:

I'd have to agree, this is more of a Network Attached Disk rather than Network Attached Storage. If you want redundancy then you'd want two of them. Therefore, you'd need a pair of NADs in order to accomplish a typical NAS setup.

concernedITpro

November 20, 2007 at 12:51pm

From QNAP's own website comparison tool, the only differences apparent between the versions of the TS-109 are that the Pro supports NFS (Linux client) and Microsoft Active Directory.

The pricing difference at the time of this comment from Newegg's retail site was that the Pro was an additional $45.00 US.

As far as everything else goes, features, speeds and feeds all are the same.

I was considering buying this device, but I am put off by the stated internal storage maximum of 1TB; I can't ascertain whether the statement is the true maximum drive size usable by the product or whether it was merely a case of the largest size currently available at the time they published their specs. One of the only reasons why I would pay so much for a NAS device sans the actual storage would be so that as drive capacities increase, I could simply upgrade the drive I chose to install within the enclosure. If there really is a ceiling on the internal drive storage size usable, then this relegates the device to something disposable, in which case it would be far too expensive.

big_montana

November 19, 2007 at 1:08pm

When one thinks of a NAS, you think of a device that can hold multiple hard drives. From the picture, and the description on qnap's site, it looks like this can only hold one drive. So, it is a very fast external hard drive enclosure, not a NAS. That in itself should have brought the score down. As my need for more storage increases, I should not have to purchase another device, I should just be able to add another drive into the unit (and it should be hot swappable). This unit only supports up to 1TB of storage, so that tells you there is only support for a single hard drive. Were you so blinded by the "features" that you overlooked the biggest flaw of it's design? The lack of expansion. How many MaxPC users out there would be able to fill up 1TB with the media collection alone? I know I could.

Networx

November 17, 2007 at 2:36pm

I checked out the QNAP site and there is a TS-109 and a TS-109 Pro case available. Which one did you review? Your articles seems to make reference to both. If it's the Pro model I have found a Canadian vendor at http://search.ncix.com/displayproductdetail.php?sku=24901&vpn=TS-109%20Pro&manufacture=QNAP%20Systems%20Inc.

I add this because it's often difficult to find the items reviewed by MaximumPC in Canada so I wanted to share this with other Canadian readers. While our dollar is kicking major ass right now it's just easier to shop from a Canadian supplier when possible. But I'm rambling now.

Great review on a product that I really need. Glad I found it.