QNAP TL-D800S Review An 8-Bay SATA JBOD DAS

QNAP TL-D800S Performance

Since this is a straight-through SFF-8088 chassis, we would expect there to be no performance loss with the attached drives.

That is what we saw with this unit. All eight drives seemed to have straight-through connectivity. There are some variances on the chart, but within a 5% margin for benchmarking, so it is not like a drive is running at SATA II 3Gbps instead of SATA III 6Gbps speeds.

We directly connected to the host system for testing, but if you used the included QNAP card, be mindful of the ASM1164 limitations. Each set of four drives needs to transit through one of these controllers if the included card is used. The 16-bay model apparently uses Marvell controllers instead.

QNAP TL-D800S Power Consumption

The system came with a reasonably nice Delta power supply. Unlike the TL-D400S, this is an internal power supply.

Generally, we saw ~20W or so of added power consumption over the drives that were installed. The JBOD has much lower power than the drives inside of the chassis.

Final Words

Perhaps the biggest challenge with this unit is simply price. At $599 these effectively cost around $75 per connected drive, or twice what the 4-bay unit costs. Since these are straight-through SATA devices, not getting an economy of scale with a lower cost feels a bit strange. One could simply go buy two of these JBODs at the same price.

The included QXP-800eS-A1164 8-port SATA card has a strange architecture using two low-end SATA chips and a PCIe switch to handle eight drives. This is a task that a Broadcom/ LSI SAS2008 or SAS3008 has been doing for years and with more functionality and performance. It just feels like this is more complex than it needs to be for a simple function.

We wish that the drive trays were the same between this and the QNAP TL-D400S Review 4-Bay SATA JBOD DAS Enclosure. It feels a bit crazy that they are different drive trays since that would be an opportunity to standardize.

Still, the JBODs worked as intended. Performance, when connected directly to systems, is generally good. Many of the USB 3 or eSATA JBODs also add internal RAID functionality that some will want, but most JBOD buyers will seek to avoid. This is one of those products where perhaps we can simply say that it was easy to set up and it worked as intended. From a unit like this, that is perhaps all that is needed.

Where to Buy

We purchased our unit on Amazon. Here is the affiliate link for this model.