QNAP TurboNAS TS-419P II 4-Bay NAS Review

In the world we are in today, data is everywhere, whether it be a simple photo or song on your phone right up to multi-level databases that run in huge datacentres. Naturally the latter is the last thing that you would be running from home so lets bring everything down to end user level for this review. In the home and also smaller offices, there may be the need to store large amounts of data that more than one person can easily gain access to. In the home this may be your music, video or photo collections whilst in an office you may have small databases, presentations and spreadsheets that more than one person may need to access. Typically the average user would have simply shared the folder from their system for everyone else to access but this does come with its limitations.

Such limitations lead to the need for an option to have everything centralised into a single place and for SOHO (Small Office – Home Office) users having a full blown server deployed onto their network is not always the most economic or financial option available to them. A NAS box however allows for the centralisation of all their data for multiple users along with the multitude of other features that individual units can offer.

As time moves on we have seen that NAS boxes are becoming a more frequent purchase for SOHO users and their flexibility and ease of setup shows why they are becoming more and more popular.

QNAP is a leading brand in the NAS sector with devices ranging from a simple single disk base model right upto rackmount units that are used in enterprise level deployment for large businesses and companies.

With this being our first NAS box review that we have ever done, we spent some time contemplating what was the best way to simplify the testing whilst still giving a comprehensive result on the performance that is on offer. Give us a motherboard, graphics card or memory and we know exactly how we are going to test them, write our review and give our feedback for you, the audience, the make your decision on what to purchase.

After a bit of research we found that there is a NAS box testing  solution available from Intel that tests a NAS box in a varying number of ways to simulate different deployment situations.  Whilst this won’t test the setup and other features such as web server, iTunes server and a boxes particular features, it will give us a set of data to write our review on based on the disk performance and speed onto the network.

With this all in mind, lets delve straight in and take a look at the QNAP TS-419P II 4 bay NAS.