QNAP TS-219P Turbo NAS device

QNAP's TS-219P Turbo is a two-bay network-attached storage (NAS) device designed for homes and small offices. It provides adequate file transfer speeds and is easy to use. It is quite similar to the TS-219 Turbo, but it offers hot-swapping and improved connectivity.

The QNAP TS-219P Turbo NAS device has a brushed metal chassis and exposed drive bays (which can be locked). A USB port on the front of the QNAP TS-219P Turbo NAS can be used to connect to external hard drives and USB flash memory. A one-touch copy button can be configured to back up data to or from the NAS device. On the back panel there are two more USB ports and a single Gigabit Ethernet port. The QNAP TS-219 Turbo lacked an eSATA port, but the TS-219P offers two of them. They will let you to connect fast external hard drives.

Like the single-bay TS-119 Turbo NAS, the QNAP TS-219P Turbo NAS device has a Marvell 6281 1.2GHz CPU and 512MB of DDR2 memory. Running two 1.5TB Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 hard drives in a RAID 0 configuration, the TS-219P Turbo consumed 24.5 Watts when idling and a maximum of 28.8W when reading data from the drives.

We tested the NAS device by transferring files from our test PC (equipped with a 300GB Western Digital VelociRaptor internal hard drive) through a Gigabit router. In Intel's NAS Performance Toolkit, the QNAP TS-219P Turbo NAS streamed 720p high-definition video at 25.75 megabytes per second (MBps). It recorded the same footage at 36.5MBps, indicating it can write footage to its drives swiftly.

We also conducted real world file transfer tests by copying 20GB worth of 3-4GB files and 3GB worth of 1MB files to the NAS device. In the large file transfer test, the TS-219P Turbo NAS wrote data at 31.9MBps, read it at 64.5MBps and performed a simultaneous read/write operation at a rate of 18.9MBps. In our small file transfer test, the NAS device's write speeds averaged 18.5MBps, while it read data at 12.3MBps. It recorded a rate of 10.5MBps in the small file read/write test. These speeds are roughly on par with the TS-219 Turbo and significantly faster than the Western Digital My Book World Edition II (4TB).

In addition to being fast, the TS-219P Turbo NAS device is easy to use. It's equipped with a simple Web interface that lets you manage shared folders, user permissions and quota settings. The internal hard drives can be configured as individual volumes, as well as in RAID 0, RAID 1 and linear drive arrays.

You can schedule BitTorrent, HTTP and FTP downloads. The NAS device can also be configured to record video from QNAP's surveillance products. The TS-219P Turbo NAS device can serve music through an iTunes server and stream media from its DLNA-compliant UPnP server, which is powered by TwonkyMedia. Further functionality can be added to the NAS device by installing third-party software through QNAP's QPKG system. These packages are available from QNAP's Web site.

Though not as slick looking as the QNAP TS-219 Turbo, the QNAP TS-219P Turbo NAS device offers eSATA ports and hot-swapping for the same price. Home users and small businesses will benefit from its easy-to-use Web interface and fast speeds when connected over Gigabit Ethernet.

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