QNAP TS-412-US Diskless System All-in-one NAS Server with iSCSI for SOHO and Home Users

Pros: Compact and stylish housing.

4 External Hot Swap bays.

Easy installation and setup *See Other

25-40MB/second write speeds depending on file size and transfer type.

35-65MB/second read speeds depending on file size and transfer type.

Supports multiple RAID types 0,1, 5, 6, and JBOD.

Includes media server software, and built in DNYDNS handling makes accessing your data from anywhere easy.*See Other

The unit is very power efficient. I have installed 4x 3Tb Western Digital Red series drives in this enclosure under RAID level 5 for a total of of 8.4Tb storage. Measured from a Kil A Watt meter under a heavy demand It managed to draw around 30W of power.

QPKG plugin system is very easy to use. I installed several apps directly from the web interface, and one manually from outside source.

ESATA ports for storage expansion. As silly as that sounds I am actually considering adding an additional 4 or 5 Bay enclosure VIA eSata to extend this server when I get close to the storage capacity.

Cons: ARM CPU, look its very powerful for the electricity it uses, but its still an ARM chip. The big downside is that a few of the QPKG plugins I intended to run on this server are X86 compatible only. If you intend to run PS3 Media Server or any plugin check the CPU type compatibility before your purchase.

TWonky Media Server does not transcode on the fly. This server does have the ability to transcode media automatically for you and save it to the share folder, but it does not have the ability to do it on the fly. If you intend to use this storage for media server purposes that require transcode on the fly you will need a different box, or simply use it as storage to your media server.*See Other

Other Thoughts: All in all I consider this a very worthwhile purchase. I got the expanded storage I needed for my media collection and backup needs, and the price was right. It looks great sitting between my two desktop / workstation machines, and its able to meet my data transfer demands.

So I spent alot of time reading reviews on many different "Diskless Systems" before purchasing this box. I did overlook a few details that have caused me to work around it, but I knew it was not the fastest NAS in this form factor. WNAP does have a great community forum setup where I was able to ask a few questions about this unit as I was integrating it into my network.

This unit does not ship with an OS installed. You have to use the included QNAP finder application to install an OS first. You may either use the one on the included DVD or download the latest version from the website. I decided to install from the web version as to avoid any potential issues updating from and older firmware. It took roughly 45Mins to format the 4 3TB disks into a RAID 5 config. Setting up the inital user info was a snap.

One of the primary uses this NAS gets is storing and serving my media collection. On my home network I have a total of 6 devices which can access the media services and I stream to as many as 3 devices at a time. Each device has had a custom PS3 Media Server config created for it and many of these devices require on the fly transcoding of my media. For this I run PS3 Media Server from my main workstation which is equipped with an overclocked AMD FX 8320 @ 4.7Ghz, and connected through an 8 port Gigabit switch. My PC file shares the media from the NAS and then transcodes the media to the required specs for the given device and off it goes.

If you dont have a network demand of greater than 40MB/sec read and 25MB/sec write, or the ARM CPU doesn't interfere with your intended installation needs then I highly recommend this unit. I have pushed somewhere in the neighborhood of 20Tb of writes through mine and who knows how much read, and its still pluging along just fine.

Pros: Works great, does all I need

Cons: HDD sleep mode with latest firmware. Take some tweaking to get the HDD to go to sleep. With the latest firmware, but I'm pretty sure they'll have it figured out soon.

Other Thoughts: For the price, you can't beat it.

Pros: reasonable price, good performance, many features, low powered and quiet.

Cons: QNAP firmware update issues.

Other Thoughts: Running 4 x 2TB Hitachi disks in RAID5. Sustained writes around 28MBps and reads around 67MBps.

3.4.0 firmware was badly bugged, after about 2 days of uptime speeds dropped by 95%, writes would time out, etc. QNAP support was not helpful. Was able to downgrade to 3.3.9 without losing data. Many users on QNAP forum had this and other issues with 3.4.0 and reverted. They are up to 3.4.2 now but I don't have confidence to try it out.

3.3.x and below do not support drives >2TB !

Pros: Flawless integration into Windows networking and Apple Time Machine. Setup of a 3-disk RAID 5 plus a hot spare was almost too easy. Stable as anything I have ever seen. After a 17-hour sustained write followed by a 14-hour sustained read, the box performed flawlessly. It never dropped connectivity, crashed, or even slowed down.

Web interface is very intuitive, while providing a lot of options.

Cons: 25MB/s sustained writes with AFP/Time Machine, 30MB/s sustained reads with AFP/Time Machine. Windows file sharing is a bit faster at 40MB/s write, 50MB/s read. All in all, an OK speed for the price, and perfectly OK for a backup device. It would be awful as a production-level or HD video editing device.

Other Thoughts: 2-3TB drives take an extremely long time to format and build arrays. It is not a shortcoming of the NAS. It is a matter of the fact that a 3TB drive writing a full format at 100-150MB/s will take several hours no matter what device is doing the format. Format the drives, and walk away for 4-6 hours. Configure the array, then come back 12 hours later.