The QNAP TS-559 Pro has been added to the NAS Charts.
Simply put, the TS-559 Pro is a five-bay version of QNAP’s TS-459 Pro. It uses the same board (labeled TS859 Pro V1.2) in a slightly wider case that accommodates the additional drive bay.
The hardware platform uses an 1.66 GHz Intel D510 Atom (Pineview) CPU and NM10 Express companion chipset, with 1 GB of DDRII RAM, a 512 MB IDE DOM (Disk on Module), ITE IT8718F "Super I/O", two Intel 82574L Gigabit Ethernet Controllers and Intel ICH9R SATA controller.
Like the TS-459 Pro, the 559 Pro is pretty quiet. But with the power supply and main cabinet fans, plus five drives spinning away, I gave it a "medium-low" rating. This means you’ll hear it in a quiet room, but it’s not loud enough to be annoying / distracting.
Power consumption measured 50 W with five 1 TB Samsung HE103UJ 3.5" SATA drives QNAP supplied with the test sample spinning and a relatively high 25 W with the drives spun down after a programmable idle period.
Tests were run with 3.2.6 Build 0423T firmware using our standard test process. Write and read performance with a Gigabit LAN connection for four-drive RAID 0 and 5 volumes are plotted below. Both RAID 0 and 5 writes show significant cache boost at file sizes below 512 MB, with RAID 5 showing higher cache effects at 128 and 256 MB file sizes.
Average RAID 5 write performance using a Gigabit Ethernet connection averaged 85.2 MB/s for file sizes between 32 MB and 4 GB, with cached behavior not included in the average calculation. Average RAID 5 read performance was significantly lower, measuring 65.4 MB/s. Both results rank the TS-559 Pro below the TS-459 Pro in the RAID 5 charts. Since the hardware platforms are essentially the same and the test platform was unchanged, the performance difference is most likely due to changes in the QNAP OS or perhaps the hardware method used to accommodate the fifth SATA channel.
RAID 5 File copy performance using our Vista SP1-based test also showed speeds slower than the TS-459 Pro with an 66.3 MB/s write speed and 71.9 MB/s read.
QNAP products support FAT, NTFS and EXT3 (and now, EXT4) formats for both USB and eSATA external drives, and you’ll find backup test results for all six combinations in the Charts. Best results of 93 MB/s were obtained using an NTFS-formatted drive connected via eSATA.
Finally, I also tested write and read speed to a 10 GB iSCSI target volume created on a RAID 5 array. Running our standard Vista SP1 filecopy test yielded a write speed of 75.2 MB/s and 80.2 MB/s for read.
Given the similarity to other QNAP NASes, there won’t be a full review of the TS-559 Pro. So use the NAS Charts to further explore the TS-559 Pro’s performance and compare it to other products.