Qnap TS-870U-RP review

Dave Mitchell Read more June 19, 2013

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£1759

Price when reviewed

Qnap’s latest NAS appliance has finally brought 10GbE performance to a price point SMBs can afford. The TS-870U-RP is an eight-bay rack-mount appliance that provides a couple of PCI Express expansion slots, which support a wide range of optional 10GbE adapters.

The TS-870U-RP crams in a huge amount for the money. There are dual 300W redundant power supplies, a 6Gbits/sec SATA III disk controller, and 4GB of DDR3 memory (which can be upgraded to 16GB). The price is kept down by removing the LCD and operator panel at the front and using a basic 2.4GHz Intel Celeron G530 CPU.

For speed testing, we installed three 4TB WD Enterprise SATA III drives and used Qnap’s slick web interface to create a RAID5 array. We then linked the appliance to Dell PowerEdge R515 and Broadberry dual-Opteron 4100 rack servers, and used Emulex OCe11102-NM 10GbE dual-port adapters on all three systems.

With a Windows share mapped to the Dell server, Iometer reported raw read and write speeds of 950MB/sec and 825MB/sec. We then ran Iometer on a second share mapped to the Broadberry server, and saw cumulative read and write speeds soar to 1,685MB/sec and 1,052MB/sec respectively.

These results translate to seriously fast real-world speeds: drag-and-drop copies of a 2.52GB video clip returned read and write speeds of 310MB/sec and 282MB/sec, and FTP speeds, using FileZilla, increased to 365MB/sec and 306MB/sec respectively. Performance bodes well for general backup operations, too, as our 22.4GB collection of 10,500 small files was copied to the appliance at a rate of 112MB/sec.

Qnap’s firmware has now reached version 3.8, but most of the additions are multimedia toys rather than business-focused additions. These comprise the new DJ Station, Video Station and TV Station, plus updates to Photo Station and Music Station 3. Surveillance Station Pro has also been updated and now boasts greater support for IP cameras and an increased range of monitoring tools, including multiple viewing windows, motion detection, scheduled recording and an e-mapping service.

There’s also a new VMobile app for conducting video-surveillance operations via iOS and Android devices, but the appliance includes only one camera licence as standard; extra licences cost around £35 each.

The TS-870U-RP’s IP SAN features are among the best. Thin provisioning is included, along with iSCSI LUN backup to a remote storage location over CIFS or NFS. Qnap offers a wide selection of freely available add-in packages, too, with ClamAV providing options to run antivirus scanning on selected folders.

We encountered no issues with the Google Drive sync package, and, for cloud backup, there’s support for ElephantDrive, Amazon S3 and Symform-hosted services. Qnap’s MyCloudNAS service provides secure remote access to selected services on the appliance, and NetBak Replicator receives a major refresh, with version 4 adding snapshots, real-time replication and support for MyCloudNAS.

The Qnap’s closest competitor is Thecus’ similarly priced N8900, but while it’s a good performer, it lacks redundant PSUs, and it’s beginning to show its age in other respects, too.

If you want an eight-bay rack-mount NAS appliance with power redundancy, an unbeatable range of features and tip-top 10GbE performance, the Qnap TS-870U-RP is a cracking choice.