After years of disappointment with the anemic Synology RS407 NAS, I finally ran out of space and had an excuse to upgrade. I opted for a QNAP device. All reviews suggested that the low read & write performance of many NASs is due to the ARM processor, so I went with an Intel Atom model – the TS-459U. I chose QNAP over some of the other vendors in the high performance SOHO NAS space because of the security camera support and the other software features that are almost as convenient as Synology’s software. QNAP supports up to 4 cameras out of the box without additional license fees – Synology charges around $50 for licenses in addition to the single camera that is supported out of the box.
Here is the initial report. First and foremost, I am not disappointed. The write performance is almost 3x what I got before:
I am getting 70 MB/second from my Lenovo T410 laptop, and a little less from my MSI P55-GD65-based Pentium Core i5 system.
I have never seen my network interface usage go up more than 10% when copying to the Synology NAS, so this is pretty exciting. I also like the surveillance station better than Synology’s.
All in all, I am pleased with the investment, and with 8TB of storage, I should be able to add on to my media library for a while without running out of space.