QNAP TVS-863+ 8-Bay NAS Review

[basroil]

I mention iSCSI because if this is aimed at "home office" market, what on earth would need remote block level access to a storage volume? The performance impact of trying to run it over a home gigabit network is so bad and the price of disks so cheap, that it makes zero sense. That's why it's largely relegated to lab environments where the user is doing some sort of project / module and needs a cheap way to simulate an "enterprise" like environment.

Lightroom and similar software of course! Lightroom has a nasty "feature" that prevents you from using a networked storage space for libraries (including mapped ones), but it won't do that with iscsi. Basically adds portability without costs greater than SMB. A lot of older software made for PoS systems also works better with iscsi, and laboratory equipment (actual hardware engineering ones, not just comp-sci) sometimes require iscsi, again because of old, poorly written software that just can't be replaced.

 

[Pctekhead]

I did a bit of a comparison between a few of the latest NAS boxes, Asustor, Synology and Qnap.

I wanted to combine a lot of different home devices into one, I have a media player and a synology NAS, a mail and webserver and a couple of PCs - I also wanted to stream a variety of media to all the portable devices, tablets. I also wanted to encode and play in 4k and to top it all I am into web development and wanted to host local development websites before deployment.

So I wanted one NAS to rule them all. Here is the one I settled on http:// QNAP TVS-EC880.

I got an 8 bays nas that supports virtualisation can be expanded to 32GB Ram uses a quad core xeon that operates at 3.4GHz and has on chip video.

It has a PCI expansion slot for 10Gbit NIC and currently has 4 x 1GBit NICs as standard (this enables me to isolate drive clusters and virtual machines from each other). IT supports two on-board mSATA internal cache ports so that drive IOPS can be enhanced and has an extensive number of rear ports and can be expanded by adding 2 more REXP 1000 Pros giving a potential 384TB of Storage (No I don't have the need for that much, but useful to know if needed the expansion is there)

I got this in Australia for $2200 AUD - because the QNAP TVS-871 was going to cost $2800AUD for a far poorer specification machine with a i3 processor, half the memory and poorer performance by a country mile.

So at the moment I am enjoying the migration over from my synology NAS and looking forward to plugging a USB tv dongle into it to HD encode tv on the go while doing everything else.

In conclusion - the pricing of these nas drives bears no resemblance to their capabilities, I personally think I got a good deal and would just advise anyone in the market to do their extensive research before stumping up their money.

It might seem counter intuitive, but when I went to try and get an i5 NAS, the Intel® Xeon® E3-1245 v3 3.4GHz quad-core processor in the one I bought knocked it out of the park by a mile - in actual fact the xeon is rated up with the i5 and i7 processors, the Qnap TVS-871 is similar, but once you added all the bells and whistles to get it to where the one I got, you suddenly end up at >$3000 AUD and the price difference can pay for 32gb DDR3 ram, and a couple of NAS HD's so a real no brainer.

I bought it in pccasegear.com.au for anyone in OZ that's looking for a similar system.

Oh and a good Uninterruptible Power Supply is a really good idea for one of these puppies, last thing you want is to load it with all your media and memories and then the power co fry it because the have a wonky transformer.