Qnap TS-469U-RP review

Dave Mitchell Read more February 12, 2013

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£1000

Price when reviewed

Intel may have put its Atom D2700 out to grass, but the TS-469U-RP from Qnap shows there’s life in the old dog yet. Our tests show this four-bay rack NAS appliance and its dual-core CPU have a good turn of speed, but do its features justify the high price?

It certainly starts well, with dual-hotplug 250W power supplies included as standard. Basic memory is 1GB and it can easily be upgraded to 3GB by whipping off the lid and dropping an extra SO-DIMM into the spare socket. There’s a host of cloud backup options, including support for Amazon S3, ElephantDrive and Symform. And you also get Qnap’s free MyCloudNAS service, which impressed when we looked at it in our review of its TS-459 Pro II.

That’s a pretty long list already, but it’s also possible to add more services. We tested the latest Google Drive add-on, and after logging on with our Google account, we could synchronise our files with a folder on the appliance and run scheduled and manual bi-directional synchronisation.

Elsewhere, the bundled NetBack Replicator receives an update with support for snapshots and replication. Qnap’s DSM 3.7 firmware adds extra features including management via smartphone. The Connect Windows app allows you to quickly create a secure Windows PPTP VPN connection to the appliance.

For testing, we loaded a quartet of WD 3TB Red SATA drives and created a RAID5 array from Qnap’s slick web interface. Performance over Gigabit was impressive, with copies of a 2.52GB video clip between the appliance and a Windows Server 2012 system returning read and write speeds of 94MB/sec and 91MB/sec. The FileZilla utility reported slightly faster FTP speeds of 104MB/sec and 102MB/sec.

The appliance handled backups of large data sets well: our 22.4GB test folder and its 10,500 small files copied to a share at a rate of 71MB/sec. Qnap’s IP SAN performance is excellent as well, with Iometer reporting an impressive raw read rate of 96MB/sec for a 100GB target.

The TS-469U-RP won’t be beaten for features, and overall performance is superb, but for a four-bay rack NAS appliance it’s expensive. We recommend you consider Synology’s RackStation RS812 instead – although it has only a single power supply and is slower, it comes in around £400 cheaper, a saving that’s hard to ignore.