This week QNAP expanded their lineup to include the TS-x69 series of 1U and 2U rackmount NAS appliances with the four disk TS-469U and eight disk TS-869U respectively. QNAP is a company well known for building “low-end” NAS appliances from 2-8 disks and has really moved into the SMB market over the past few years. Traditional storage vendors such as EMC and NetApp do not play in the low end of the market place as much with starting prices around $10,000. By contrast, I have seen the TS-869U for approximately $2,000 at retail and the TS-469U for around $1,500. One question I have… is QNAP using either an otherwise unreleased Atom or an End-of-Life Atom to power these boxes?
Looking at the two units, the TS-469U is a 1U rackmount unit using an Intel Atom CPU and 1GB DDR3 to manage four drive bays. Similarly the TS-869U is a 2U rackmount unit but comes with the same 2.13GHz Intel Atom CPU, 2GB of DDR3 and eight 3.5″ drive bays. Both units come with redundant power supplies.
Here is what is really interesting to me, Intel lists two Atom CPUs at 2.13GHz. Here is the Intel ARK comparison for those interested. The D2700 is the newer chip launched about a year ago, but it is currently listed as End of Life. An EOL designation is very common in the technology industry and is usually followed by End of Availability and End of Support. With many companies, end of availability is loosely defined and one can still find parts available. Still, it seems too bad that QNAP’s new product launch occurred at a time when last year’s Atom is being phased out. QNAP makes great products so it is not something I would be worried about. My sense is that they likely have an ample supply already manufactured and placed onto PCB.
Specs say that the Atom is limited to 4GB of DDR3 but if I had one of these boxes the first thing I would try is getting 8GB installed. We found with the Supermicro X7SPE-HF and X7SPA-HF that the Atom machines spec’d at 4GB max can actually handle up to 8GB of DDR3.
Alas, Intel, please release a dual or quad core Atom with Hyper-Threading, vPro, one x8 PCIe 3.0 bus and ECC support!
| Taipei, Taiwan, July 30, 2012 – QNAP Systems, Inc. today officially expanded its latest business-ready Turbo NAS family, the TS-x69U-RP series, with 2 new rackmount units that really mean business. The expansion includes 4 and 8-drive models, delivering up to 32TB (using 4TB drives) of high-performance networked storage, redundant power supplies for enhanced reliability, and a wealth of business-ready applications for cross-platform file sharing, network-wide backup, server virtualization storage, and much more.At the heart of the new models is a Dual-core Intel Atom 2.13GHz CPU, equipped with 1GB DDR3 RAM on TS-469U-RP, 2GB DDR3 RAM on TS-869U-RP, and support for SATA 6Gb/s 2.5” and 3.5” hot-swappable drives to provide the performance demanded by today’s SMBs; critical for keeping businesses running at their highest productivity levels.“The TS-x69U-RP series are fantastic performers and exceptionally reliable,” said Jason Hsu, QNAP product manager. “QNAP internal testing shows that both writing and reading speeds in typical Windows environments exceed 220 MB/sec in network trunking mode. Legendary QNAP quality and value make these NAS models a business-owner’s dream come true.”The TS-x69U-RP series provides secure cross-platform file sharing and network-wide backup/data replication for Windows, Mac, and Linux/UNIX users, an iSCSI/IP-SAN storage combo solution, and versatile business applications. With VMware Ready™ and Citrix Ready verification, and proven compatibility with the Microsoft Windows Hyper-V environment, the new series is an ideal shared storage solution for virtualized and clustered environments.
The new TS-x69U-RP series comes with new v3.7 firmware, which provides many business-critical features such as Windows ACL, VPN Server, Windows AD and LDAP support, bandwidth control for Real Time Remote Replication (RTRR) and rsync backup, and the comprehensive Surveillance Station Pro with up to 12 camera support and Vmobile app for iOS and Android devices. Key Specs of New Models
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I saw the press release multiple times. You are the first to actually break down the internals and that info on the Atom is really interesting. Hope you get a review unit.
Any plans to start reviewing QNAP, Synology, and others?
Would be good to see more reviews of these. Performance compared to others and home builds. Of course easier to just buy this.
I think SuperMicro heard you.
SuperMicro recently announced a motherboard that looks promising (X9SPV-F/LN4F).
– 16GB ECC, IPMI 2.0, a PCI-E 3.0 x16 slot
– and mobile Intel CPUs that support Hyper-Threading and Virtualization.
Unfortunately, I have not been able to find pricing on the board by itself.
I hope STH can get their hands on one of these boards and put it through it’s paces.
Will see what I can do with that. BTW you can get these in systems such as the SYS-5017P-TLN4F (4 GbE version)
That looks like that could be nice low power pfSense box.
SuperMicro also announced the X9SCM-iiF which has two 82547L Ethernet ports instead of one 82547L and one 82547LM as the X9SCM-F.
I just recently acquired the TS-469U-RP and am going to test 16GB via 2x8GB. If this works, it should also confirm that the Supermicro X7SPE-HF and X7SPA-HF can also upgrade to 16GB. I also have some very rare 16GB DDR3 SODIMM modules en route to me. I don’t expect these to work (32GB total), but may try them anyways.