Fujitsu Celvin Q902 review

Where other blue-chip vendors such as Cisco have pulled out of the SMB storage market of late, Fujitsu has been quietly building up its portfolio.

In this exclusive review, we look at its six-bay Q902 – the latest NAS appliance to join its Celvin family.

It employs a 2.13GHz Intel Atom D2700 CPU, which may be dated, but it’s still used by many other NAS manufacturers. This is combined with 2GB of DDR3 memory, which can be upgraded to 3GB, although you’ll need to replace one of the two 1GB SODIMMs already fitted in the appliance.

Connectivity is good: along with dual Gigabit Ethernet ports, there are two USB 3, five USB 2 and two eSATA sockets. The USB 2 port at the front ties in with the Copy button for quick data backups between a connected storage device and a predefined folder.

Fujitsu’s Finder software discovers the appliance for you, and provides direct access to its well-designed web interface. For testing, we loaded six 1TB Seagate SATA drives and created a two-drive mirror, plus a four-drive RAID5 data array.

The Q902 delivered impressive performance over Gigabit. Copies of a 2.52GB video clip between the appliance and a Dell PowerEdge R515 Windows Server 2012 system returned read and write speeds of 97MB/sec and 95MB/sec. FTP speeds were faster, with the FileZilla utility reporting 103MB/sec. The appliance handled backups of small files well, too, with our 22.4GB collection of 10,500 files copying to a mapped drive at an average of 69MB/sec.

IP SAN features are excellent, with support for iSCSI thin provisioning and LUN backup to local folders or remote shares. Performance here is good, too, with Iometer reporting a raw read rate of 96MB/sec for a 100GB target.

Storage features are abundant, but this is no surprise, since the Q902 is essentially a rebranded Qnap TS-669 Pro. The Q902 is better value, though: the diskless model costs around £60 less and comes with twice the memory. Fujitsu also includes a two-year RTB warranty, upgradeable to three-year on-site for £23 and next business day for only £41.

However, the Q902 can’t quite match the Qnap’s flexibility. Although you can still download extra features via the package download service, just as you can with Qnap devices, Fujitsu won’t support them.

It doesn’t support the Qnap MyCloudNAS service, either, which we first reviewed with its TS-459 Pro II TurboNAS. The company is working on this for a future release, however, and the Q902 does come with 17 packages preinstalled, including all multimedia servers, and others for antivirus, LDAP, RADIUS, Syslog and VPNs.

Fujitsu includes NetBak Replicator 4 for workstation backup, but this is two revisions old and doesn’t support Windows 8 or Server 2012. We tested with the latter and found it installed fine but refused to run.

Qnap’s TS-669 Pro is the better choice if you want more features and supported access to Qnap’s package community, then. However, if these points aren’t important, the Fujitsu Celvin Q902 is cheaper, just as fast and has a blue-chip warranty that can be cheaply upgraded.

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