Pros & Cons
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- Fast performance.
- Well-designed management interface.
- Advanced feature set.
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- Management interface quirky in Firefox.
- Not enough detail in help.
- Does not ship with drives.
QNAP TS-259 Pro-2 Drive Turbo NAS Server Specs
| External USB Hard Disk Expansion | |
| Hard Disk Configuration | RAID |
| Media Server | |
| Network Medium | Wired |
| Printer Server | |
| Rack-mount or Standalone | Standalone |
| RAID Level | RAID 1 |
| Remote Access | |
| UPnP Capable |
As a NAS for small business, QNAP's TS-259 Pro-2 Drive Turbo NAS Server is close in features and functionality to
The TS-259 also has all the features and more than you'd expect from a serious contender in the small business storage market. It lists at a decent $599.99 but it does not ship with any hard drives. Resellers can opt to provide drives to customers, which can invariably, drive up that list price. However, the TS-259 can also be purchased from e-tailers, so not offering it with drives is unfortunate since other NAS devices targeted to the SMB come with drives preinstalled. The Storcenter and ShareSpace competition are more of a bargain for that reason, but you are getting faster performance and a more extensive set of business-class features with QNAP's product. It's worth the price, but not quite worth being our Editors' Choice.
Design
The TS-259 Pro Turbo NAS server is the entry model of QNAP's latest line of Business Series Turbo NAS devices. It is a small tower with 1 GB DDRII memory and dual drive bays for up to two hot-swappable 3.5" or 2.5" SATA hard drives (not included) for an internal maximum capacity of 4 TB. It's also got five USB 2.0 ports as well as two external SATA (eSATA) ports to connect even more storage. The hard drives have locks to prevent someone from just popping them out, which is good because the drive trays slip in and out of the chassis with ease.
Additional physical security is provided though a Kensington Security Lock, also called K-Slots. K-Slots are commonly used on portable devices like laptops to anchor them to walls or heavy tables. The TS-259 can't be pocketed since it weighs a little over seven pounds (with two SATA drives installed) and measures 5.91" (H) by 4.02" (W) by 8.5" (D). But it is small enough for someone to walk away with.
Two Gigabit LAN ports and a VGA port round out the rest of the connectivity options. The VGA port is reserved for maintenance and running Linux-based command lines. You can not use it to stream video to a monitor or connect a VGA-compatible TV.
The front panel has several LED indicators for activity status of internal drives, LAN, and eSATA activity. That's not as nice of a display as the LCD panel on the Iomega's Storcenter ix4-200d, but it's better than nothing. There's a "One Touch" Copy Button that can be configured to perform instant data backup from an external USB drive to the TS-259 or vice-versa. QNAP's Turbo NAS lineup supports Windows, Mac and Linux environments.—
Although yours won't (unless you purchase a pre-configured TS-259 from a reseller) the unit we were sent for testing came with two Western Digital 750 GB SATA drives already installed. I removed one to see if there were any hassles with install. There were not. Simply slip the hard drive into the tray, line up the holes and lock into place with provided screws. One cautionary note, be careful with the screws. The drive trays have large air-flow holes that the tiny screws can easily slip through, and you will get sick of having to remove the tray after about the third screw retrieval, as I did. A magnetized screwdriver made the job easier. Don't worry, most drives today have enough magnetic shielding that the screwdriver won' t do much.
Two beeps indicate the NAS server is fully powered up. An accompanying CD has the "Install QNAP Finder" utility you can find the TS-259 on the network. A wizard walks you through configuring the device. First task: give the device a name that's easily recognizable on a network. Other settings include date and time, password, filename encoding and network settings. The TS-259 supports DHCP or you can use static IP information.
Once the preliminary setup is complete, the TS-259's management software is accessible via a web browser. Users can opt to login to the management console using the more secure HTTPS (SSL). In fact, you can enforce SSL as the only way to access the console.
The V3.2 NAS Management Software is well-designed. There are a ton of features and configuration settings, yet the interface is not cluttered and settings are not buried in layers of configuration windows. The workflow of the interface is smooth and the responsiveness is quick while clicking through it. From the initial screen, access the administration console, the Web file manager, QNAP Customer Service or the QNAP Wiki and Forum.
The quickest way to get up and running is via the Turbo Station Wizard. I created a user and the wizard walked me through setting the disk space quota level, a personal share folder and privileges for that user.
Give users full, read only or deny access to the share folders, or setup FTP for file sharing. The Turbo Station Wizard is the way to go to setup initial users, groups and shared folders. Trying to navigate through the dizzying amount of features upon first setup can get too involved. The Turbo Station Wizard is not as polished as that of the Western Digital ShareSpace, but it's as easy to use as Western Digital's and Iomega's.—
Like the Iomega StorCenter, the TS-259 is VMware certified and has iSCSI support, which may be overkill for some small businesses but is still a "nice-to-have."
There are configuration options for network, hardware and power management. Some are quite sophisticated like port trunking, which combines the link speeds of the two TS-259's LAN ports, increasing network access speed. This is typically only found on higher-end storage devices like Buffalo Technology Inc's 4 TB TeraStation III Network Attached Storage (TS-X4.0TL/R5), which lists at $1319.99. Port trunking also allows for redundancy; if one Ethernet port fails the network connection will failover to the second port.
There are built-in security controls, also rare in devices built for the SMB. For instance, it's possible to block attempted intrusions into the NAS by using the handy Network Access Protection settings. The TS-250 also supports file encryption.
Since network equipment problems can result from environmental conditions like extreme temperatures, the Smart Fan utility is extremely useful. Use it to increase, decrease or stop the fan under default or specified system, CPU or hard drive temperature parameters.
Disk management options are plentiful. Users can setup RAID 0 (known as disk striping) to increase performance or RAID 1 (known as mirroring which copies data from one disk to a second, back-up disk), expand the capacity of a volume, configure a spare volume, or migrate RAID configurations. Many of these tasks can be done without data loss on the drives due to the TS-250's online RAID capacity expansion and RAID level migration capabilities. The device supports S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology), a good way to check on the health of your hard disk drives before disaster strikes.
The services and applications included with this NAS are more than sufficient for a small business. The TS-259 integrates with a Windows domain, Apple Networking, or Linux networks. It offers Telnet, a Web server, MySQL and other services. Use it to share multimedia files or to set up an iTunes server. There is even support for using IP cameras for surveillance and saving the video direct to the NAS. Shared Folder Aggregation and support for virtual disks are also part of the robust feature set.—
With the Atom processor, I expected decent performance from this NAS but not at the level I received. I isolated the TS-259 and a laptop on a Linksys Gigabit Ethernet Switch. Uploading a 1.5 GB file using the device's Web File Manager to the NAS took 41 seconds -- an average of 37.5 Megabytes per second. That is a truly impressive transfer rate, although not as high as the transfer rate we got with the
I also performed a file copy using only Windows Explorer and the average rate was a bit slower at 34 MBps.
One issue with file uploads: I was initially unable to use Firefox 3.5 or 3.6 beta to upload to the NAS via the TS-259's Web File Manager. I was stopped dead with the message "Error caused a send or load operation to fail. Error # 2038. I also experienced two crashes when using Web File Manager and Firefox. A reboot appeared to correct the problems, but I could not pinpoint the exact cause.
There were a couple of other issues with uploading through the Web File Manager. There is no way to select multiple files or upload folders. The file upload size maximum is 2 GB, but there are rare instances when someone would need to more than that. Users are better off using Windows Explorer for file management.
I tested changing the RAID configuration. It was really easy to transform the RAID 0 setup to RAID 1. Almost too easy. The interface is so responsive that a user could accidentally quick-click through the solo warning that pops up about how reconfiguring the RAID level will destroy all of your data. QNAP needs to make this warning stronger before the actual reconfiguration takes place.
Bottom Line
QNAP has delivered a solid, feature-rich and fast performing NAS. The coupling of Intel's PineView Technology with a high-end feature set in
a NAS for small business, is a winner, despite some minor issues within the interface. The fact that it is flexible enough to function as a multi-purpose server is a great way for businesses to get the most bang for the buck. The only shame continues to be that the TS-259 NAS doesn't include hard disk drives.
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Final Thoughts
QNAP TS-259 Pro-2 Drive Turbo NAS Server
One of the best performing NAS devices we've tested, the TS-259 is filled with services and applications that meet the needs of just about any small business.