AMD’s Ryzen Enters the High-End NAS Market in QNAP’s TS-x77

Move over Intel, there’s a new king in the kingdom. At the very least, there’s a new prince that is out for their head. AMD‘s Ryzen processors have made quite a wave in the market since the initial release and the company is far from done. Soon, we’ll get the Threadripper CPU, but this article is about the normal Ryzen 5 and Ryzen 7 CPUs. As the first company, QNAP has offered a sneak preview at the world’s first Ryzen powered NAS, the TS-x77 series.

AMD in NAS Devices

AMD isn’t completely new to the storage market and we have seen AMD-powered NAS before. There haven’t been many, but there have been some. However, AMD has been popular in the DIY NAS market thanks to their price to performance ratio. Whether it was the Neo II, E-series, or A-series, the processors did a great job. In fact, they delivered a better drive volume performance on CPU intensive file systems such as ZFS.

Ryzen and NAS Usage

I think that most of us know by now that the Ryzen series shines in CPU intensive tasks. The extra cores available along with the modern architecture make it a powerful choice, and not just in the desktop market. A NAS is a lot more than a storage container these days, for example, you can run VMs from them and develop your IoT systems in a secure and closed environment. Those are areas where Ryzen’s 8 cores and 16 threads will come in very handy and deliver a yet unseen bang-for-the-buck high-end NAS scenario.

QNAP’s TS-x77 Series

The TS-x77 will come with various CPU options where the most powerful is the 8-core/16-thread Ryzen 7 1700. Other CPU options include the 6-core/12-thread Ryzen 5 1600 and the 4-core/8-thread Ryzen 5 1400. The processors support AES-NI encryption acceleration and up to 64GB DDR4 memory.

There will also be various options for the amount of drive bays. QNAP plans 6, 8, and 12-bay models. Every model in the series provides three PCIe Gen.3 slots for expansion with 10/40GbE NICs, NVMe SSD, graphics cards, or USB expansion cards. Just think about that for a bit, the base power and the expansion options, the operation system and the VM options. Near limitless options. Besides the normal drive bays, the units also feature two SATA M.2 slots for SSD caching.

Availability

QNAP plans a release of the TS-x77 series for Q3 2017, so if you’re in the market for a NAS capable of IOPS-demanding workloads and multitasking, then you might want to hold out for this series.

Want to know more?

We’re at Computex where this new series is presented, so we’ll be back with more. You can also check out the official product sheet for the models (PDF file slideshow).