SmallNetBuilder

Features

Yup, you guessed it. I'm not going to spend a lot of time describing the 639's feature set. See Craig Ellison's TS-409 review and my more recent TS-119 review for backup details. Otherwise the getting-too-big-for-easy-comparison QNAP Feature Comparison Chart is the best place to match up the 639's feature set against your shopping checklist.

Here is my handy-dandy summary for quick reference:

• Single disk, JBOD, RAID 0, 1, 5, 5+spare, 6 volumes
• RAID Expansion for all volume types
• RAID Migration: single drive to RAID 1, 5, or 6; RAID 1 to RAID 5 or 6; RAID 5 to RAID 6
• Accepts 1.5 and 2 TB qualified drives
• Network file sharing via SMB/CIFS, NFS, AFP
• FTP and secure FTP with bandwidth control
• HTTP / HTTPs file access
• Joins NT Domain / Active Directories for account information
• Attached Backup: Immediate or scheduled supporting FAT32, EXT3, NTFS drive formats (built-in formatter)
• Network Backup: Immediate or scheduled via rsync w/ encryption and compression options
• Client Backup: QNAP Netbak replicator (Windows only)
• iSCSI target support
• User quotas
• Email alerts
• Logging
• USB print server
• UPS shutdown synchronization
• LAMP webserving with MySQL, SQLite databases, phpMyAdmin, Joomla
• Root access via SSH and Telnet
• Media servers: UPnP AV / DLNA (TwonkyMedia), iTunes
• Web photo album
• BitTorrent / HTTP / FTP download service w/ scheduling
• IP camera recording and playback (four cameras)

In Use

The 639 hasn't yet received the new AJAX-based admin GUI, so you'll have to put up the the serviceable, but homely old one for awhile longer. Check out QNAP's short video if you want to see what the new interface looks like. To me, it looks very similar to Synology's interface.

I didn't cover the iSCSI target features when I looked at the TS-119, so I'll do it this time. Like the Thecus N7700, the 639 and other QNAPs that support iSCSI let you create multiple iSCSI targets (8 maximum) by allocating space on a volume. As Figure 4 shows, each target can be open or authenticate via CHAP.

Figure 4: Setting up an iSCSI target

Figure 5 shows the iSCSI Target summary, which I caught in in the middle of creating a target. Connecting to the iSCSI targets is easy with Windows. If you don't know how, try following what I did. I'll cover iSCSI throughput in the next section.

Figure 5: iSCSI target creation in progress