News Qnap's Tiny Portable NAS Crams in Four SSDs and Dual 2.5GbE

[Admin]

Qnap's NASbook TBS-464 houses four M.2-2280 SSDs and two 2.5GbE ports.

Qnap's Tiny Portable NAS Crams in Four SSDs and Dual 2.5GbE : Read more

 

[htwingnut]

That looks like it could be a great little Linux or Windows box if you can install your own OS.

In any case a few things that are questionable:

• 2.5GbE ports. Great and all, but why not include a 10G SFP+ port? 4x NVMe drives will easily saturate even a 10G line.
• No Thunderbolt? Would be a great fast DAS but limited by USB 3.2 isn't much better than the 2.5GbE ports.
• No support for ECC RAM. This day and age, especially a device intended for data storage, should support and include ECC RAM
• Non expandable RAM. 8GB should be plenty but adding room for more is always welcome.

Having a box that is likely expensive with this much super fast storage is sadly bottlenecked and crippled. Seems like they want you to use it as an independent device with USB 2.0 ports and dual HDMI ports. I'm not sure exactly what to think of it to be honest.

 

[Peter Buelow]

That looks like it could be a great little Linux or Windows box if you can install your own OS.

In any case a few things that are questionable:

• 2.5GbE ports. Great and all, but why not include a 10G SFP+ port? 4x NVMe drives will easily saturate even a 10G line.
• No Thunderbolt? Would be a great fast DAS but limited by USB 3.2 isn't much better than the 2.5GbE ports.
• No support for ECC RAM. This day and age, especially a device intended for data storage, should support and include ECC RAM
• Non expandable RAM. 8GB should be plenty but adding room for more is always welcome.

Having a box that is likely expensive with this much super fast storage is sadly bottlenecked and crippled. Seems like they want you to use it as an independent device with USB 2.0 ports and dual HDMI ports. I'm not sure exactly what to think of it to be honest.

I think this is gonna be pretty expensive to make a general purpose PC. It doesn't really have PC specs. However, without some of the extras that I find silly (IR for a NAS?), this does a great job of being a useful personal use NAS that could be hacked into a small home rack. I am really interested in this so I can do what I'm doing today with my 7 year old NAS, but finally with NVMe. Hope it hits a price point I can stomach.

 

[pixelpusher220]

Qnap's NASbook TBS-464 houses four M.2-2280 SSDs and two 2.5GbE ports.

Qnap's Tiny Portable NAS Crams in Four SSDs and Dual 2.5GbE : Read more

Wouldn't there be thermal issues with 4 NVMe's in such a small plastic case? I'm assuming there's not active cooling involved here....

 

[htwingnut]

I think this is gonna be pretty expensive to make a general purpose PC. It doesn't really have PC specs. However, without some of the extras that I find silly (IR for a NAS?), this does a great job of being a useful personal use NAS that could be hacked into a small home rack. I am really interested in this so I can do what I'm doing today with my 7 year old NAS, but finally with NVMe. Hope it hits a price point I can stomach.

I guess I was just thinking from a hobbyist perspective. I'm always interested in turning hardware into a general purpose PC just to see if I can.

I think it's great in concept. My concern is with I/O. USB 3.2 Gen 1 is 5 Gbps and ethernet is 2.5Gbps so you essentially have performance of a SATA SSD (500-600MB/sec) using 4x NVMe drives in a RAID config where you can theoretically achieve at minimum 8000 MB/sec sequential. If nothing else, Thunderbolt would have made a great option to use as a DAS. And/or use SATA M.2 SSD's instead of NVMe. So I just am having a hard time wrapping my head around a use case for this device.

Wouldn't there be thermal issues with 4 NVMe's in such a small plastic case? I'm assuming there's not active cooling involved here....

I hope there is some active cooling. There's ventilation slots at the sides, but doesn't seem it'd be sufficient for passive cooling. Then again, since external I/O is restricted to 5Gbps USB or 2.5Gbps ethernet, the SSD's won't be working that hard at any given time. I guess during a data scrub might be problematic. I'm sure there will be a full evaluation/review/teardown shortly after it's released.