QNAP TS-419P Turbo NAS device

QNAP's TS-419P Turbo NAS device has four drive bays and can house up to 8TB of storage. It offers plenty of features to suit both homes and small businesses, but it didn't perform spectacularly in our tests.

The TS-419P Turbo NAS has the same design as QNAP's other NAS devices. The four drive bays are lockable and support both 2.5in and 3.5in SATA II hard drives (no drives are included).

The NAS device has a single USB port on the front, and the accompanying one-touch copy button can be configured to back up to and from flash drives and external hard drives that have FAT32, NTFS, ext3 and ext4 file systems. There are three more USB ports around back that can be used to plug in hard drives, printers and UPS devices. The back panel also has two eSATA ports and two Gigabit Ethernet ports that support load balancing and failover.

The TS-419P Turbo NAS is slower than the more expensive TS-439 Pro Turbo NAS. The former, which is $400 cheaper, has a 1.2GHz Marvell 6281 processor and 512MB of RAM, while the latter uses a 1.6GHz Intel Atom CPU and has 1GB of RAM. A slower CPU and less memory leads to longer reboot times, as well as slower file transfers.

You don't lose any software features, however. The TS-419P Turbo NAS supports Windows (SMB), Apple (AFP) and Linux (NFS) network protocols, and can host Web and FTP servers. It also offers an iSCSI target service and can connect to other iSCSI servers on the local network.

Drives can be configured in RAID levels 0, 1, 5, 5 + Hot Spare, 6, as well as JBOD (combined drive volume) or left as individual volumes. Internal hard drives can be formatted to use either ext3 or ext4.

An integrated download station allows you to initiate and schedule downloads from Web sites and FTP servers, as well as BitTorrent trackers. You can use the Download Station Web interface or the bundled QGet software for Mac and Windows. The TS-419P Turbo NAS can serve media over an iTunes server as well as a DLNA-compliant UPnP server powered by TwonkyMedia.

The NAS device offers plenty of wizards to help with setting up users and different server features. Unlike Synology's Disk Station Manager, the multimedia browser on the TS-419P Turbo merely displays files and won't play back hosted video or audio.

For our tests, we installed two 1.5TB Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 hard drives in a RAID 0 array. We used Intel's NAS Performance Toolkit to gauge the NAS device's ability to stream high-definition video and perform simultaneous read/write tasks. We also conducted two file transfer tests between the NAS device and a PC equipped with a 300GB Western Digital Velociraptor hard drive. The first file transfer test involved 20GB of 3-4GB files, while the second used 3GB of 1MB files.

QNAP's TS-419P Turbo NAS device performed relatively poorly in all three tests. It was particularly poor at streaming 720p video in Intel's NAS Performance Toolkit but could handle small files better than some other 4-bay NAS devices. Nevertheless, cheaper alternatives like Synology's Disk Station DS409 are clearly a better option for moving large files quickly.

With our two-drive configuration, the TS-419P Turbo NAS' power consumption averaged 30.2 Watts when idle, and 13W when asleep. Power consumption peaked at 33.5W when performing simultaneous tasks, which is slightly less than Synology's Disk Station DS409 consumed using the same drives.

The TS-419P Turbo NAS device isn't a great performer, so we wouldn't recommend it for streaming 1080p video across a network. However, the number of server capabilities it offers makes it a viable option for those looking to host large amounts of data both locally and over the Web.

Follow PC World Australia on Twitter: @PCWorldAu