Qnap TS-409 Pro

Is bigger always better? Not necessarily. Qnap’s TS-409 Pro is packed with the same features as the company’s TS-109 Pro but includes twice as much memory and supports four hard drives rather than just one. And it rocks, but only if we compare it to similarly sized foes, such Buffalo’s four-drive TeraStation Live.

The TS-409 Pro doesn't include any additional connections over the TS-109 Pro. In fact, you lose an eSATA port.

The TS-409 Pro is the fastest multiple-drive NAS box we’ve tested, producing excellent scores in our read and write benchmarks. But the same can’t be said when we expand the field to include single-drive NAS devices.

Qnap’s own TS-109 Pro overtakes the TS-409 Pro in half of our transfer benchmarks. We didn’t expect this since the hardware in the two products is almost identical. If anything, the TS-409 Pro should trounce its predecessor, thanks to an additional 128MB of onboard DDR2 memory.

It’s no surprise that the devices’ administration software is also nearly identical. However, since it supports multiple drives, the TS-409 allows you to configure RAID levels; other additions include support for hard-drive SMART statistics and a new way to schedule backups to connected USB devices. We would have liked even more improvements, such as a more streamlined interface for easier use, a better downloading application, and a one-button approach for backing up one internal drive to another.

Qnap downgrades the NAS experience by stripping functionality out of the TS-109 Pro and packaging these features into external software applications for the TS-409 Pro. You now manage FTP, HTTP, and BitTorrent downloads using the QGet program. We’d much prefer a client with the functionality of Azureus or uTorrent—QGet lacks scheduling and tweaking options.

The included Netback Replicator is a great one-click backup application but a poor synchronization app since it goes only one way: You can’t sync a folder on the TS-409 Pro to your computer. The program only copies files you dump into a folder on your machine to a folder of your choice on the TS-409 Pro.

The TS-409 Pro is the best multi-drive NAS box we’ve tested, but that doesn’t mean it’s perfect. Since Qnap is upgrading all of its other NAS devices, it might be worth waiting to see if the company spruces up this one as well.

Qnap TS-409 Pro

Catnap

Fastest of the larger NAS boxes; incredibly detailed administrative options

Catnip

A size upgrade over the TS-109 Pro, and that's it; slower than its predecessor.

www.qnap.com

Benchmarks

	Qnap TS-409 Pro	Qnap TS-109 Pro	Buffalo TeraStation Live
Size	N/A	N/A	2TB
PC to NAS, small (min:sec)	0:45	0:37	1:05
PC to NAS, large (min:sec)	3:04	2:25	3:50
NAS to PC, small (min:sec)	0:33	0:43	1:20
NAS to PC, large (min:sec)	1:45	2:44	5:16

Best scores are bolded. We used the CD contents of Maximum PC’s November 2007 CD for the small-file testing, and a single 3GB file for the large-file testing. All scores are averages of three transfer trials.