New To The Charts: QNAP TS-219P Turbo NAS

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Tim Higgins

The 219P is a two-drive BYOD SATA NAS whose drive trays can take 3.5" or 2.5" SATA drives up to 2 TB in capacity. The hot-swappable drives are configurable in JBOD, RAID 0 and RAID 1 arrays and RAID expansion and migration are supported. Our review sample came with two Samsung HD103UJ 1 TB 3.5" drives installed. The 219P runs QNAP’s new AJAX-based interface, which made administration a more pleasant task.

Hardware-wise, the 219P is similar to the QNAP TS-119, based on a Marvell Kirkwood 88F6281 @ 1.2 GHz processor and 512 MB of soldered-on-board DDRII RAM. There is only a single 10/100/1000 Ethernet port supporting up to 9K jumbo frames, but there are two eSATA connectors in addition to 3 USB 2.0 ports for drive expansion and attached backup. The USB ports also support UPS shutdown sync and printer sharing.

Power consumption measured 28 W with the two Samsung drives and 9 W with the drives spun down via the programmable idle time (between 5 and 60 minutes of inactivity). Shutdown, startup and restart can also be scheduled daily, weekly on the weekend or on specific days.

Fan and drive noise are medium low, meaning the NAS is audible in a quiet room. The main noise sources are the drives themselves and some cabinet rattle. The variable speed case fan was audible briefly during system start up and did kick on once for a short time during the performance testing.

CIFS/SMB, AFP and NFS network file systems are supported, and files can also be accessed via FTP and secure (SSL/TLS) FTP. HTTPS is supported for admin access. Up to eight iSCSI targets can be configured and the NAS also can act as an iSCSI initiator.

Media features include iTunes and UPnP AV / DLNA (Twonkymedia) servers and there is a download service for HTTP, FTP and BitTorrent files. The full set of QNAP features are supported including photo web serving, surveillance camera recording and LAMP webserving.

Immediate and scheduled backup can be done to an attached USB or eSATA drive or via rsync to networked rsync targets. Fastest backup of 32.82 MB/s was measured using a FAT32 eSATA drive.

RAID 1 write performance with a Gigabit LAN connection tops the current RAID 1 charts averaging 60.7 MB/s for file sizes between 32 MB and 4 GB, with cached behavior not included in the average calculation. Read performance was slightly lower, measuring 55.4 MB/s with the same conditions, ranking behind the Buffalo TeraStation Duo at 56.1 MB/s. File copy performance using a Vista SP1 client under the same conditions (RAID 1, Gigabit LAN) measured 32.2 MB/s for write and 50.9 MB/s for read.

The QNAP’s features have been well-explored in other QNAP reviews, so a full review isn’t currently planned. Don’t forget to compare performance (including backup) using the NAS Charts.

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