QNAP debuts 'low cost' TS-410 Turbo NAS for home use
By Donald Melanson 
posted Oct 5th 2009 3:54PM
posted Oct 5th 2009 3:54PM
QNAP's various NAS devices may not do much to distinguish themselves from one another based on appearances, but the company's apparently hoping that's its new TS-410 model will attract a bit more interest nonetheless, and its aiming it squarely at home and home office users. Helping it in that respect is its relatively low-cost price tag, "just" $449 (sans hard drives), which still gets you plenty of NAS-ness, even if it may be just slightly behind the latest and greatest. That includes a less powerful 800MHz Marvell processor instead of the increasingly common Atom, and a mere 256MB of DDR2 RAM, which is a good deal short of the 1GB or 2GB offered in some of QNAP's higher-end options. Of course, you will still get support for up to four 2.5-inch or 3.5-inch hard drives, a full range of RAID options, and four USB ports and 2 e-SATA ports for further expansion. Sound good enough? Then you can pick this one up right now.
for that price, one can build a nice windows home server including disks, that performs better, and delivers more features than this nas (the better than raid disk setup, the automatic full backups of xp, vista, win7 systems, and more).
i never 'got' NAS actually... :)
It's about less hassle. You just pop some hard drives into this and the rest is rather easy to setup all from a web browser. It's not too bad of a deal when you look at all the features QNAP has (or even FreeNAS for that matter) such as bit torrent. So instead of having you computer on, this little box can do your torrents and you just access it from a browser.
and use $15 dollar worth of electricity instead of less than $1 of electricity from these standalone device, right?
@krische: a finished winhomeserver that you can buy is no more hassle than this nas. you can get such from hp for example.
mine is custom built for more fun, but to each it's own. a winhomeserver acts just as a nas, but delivers more.
@ET: well, you can build it with an atom based chipset. it's not like this device (and espencially the hdds) does not consume power.
mine consumes more power, it's built on a core2duo. but fully passive, standing in a corner invisibly, so it doesn't matter. and that 15$ a year i can accept for the guarantee of having all my systems all time fully secured trough the backup, and the best and most simple storage system you can ever get from a NAS.
The difference is that a WHS can backup all your PCs automatically, be a web server, support FTP, rip and store movies and CDs, and a whole lot more. If it uses $14 in electricity a year, I'm certainly willing to pay it.
I looked into building a WHS server and it's more expensive than you might think. Most Atom motherboards only have two SATA ports, and most mini-ITX cases only have one 3.5" bay. You can add a SATA board and use a larger case, but it adds to cost as well as power consumption. (Larger cases tend to come with larger power supplies, and power supplies tend to be inefficient at power output much lower than the rated maximum.)
But the ready-made WHS solutions are nice. I have the Acer H340 and it's been great. My only complaint is the lack of RAID, but I don't think it's essential for a backup device - it's pretty unlikely that the server and client computer both have drives crash on the same day.
Actually, for $400 you can get the Acer Easystore H340... This is what I got, and it's STILL a much better deal...
http://www.rgbfilter.com/?p=1190
2GB RAM, Atom processor, WHS pre-installed and a 1TB drive. Best deal out there. Even better for those who jumped in when it came with the free extra TB for 2TB total.
@KK
WHS doesn't include RAID because they do their own data duplication. Backups are mirror to more than 1 drive. So the odds of all 3 drives failing at once is very slim.
You don't even have to build it yourself. You can just pick off of
a list of parts for a semi-custom box builder and then shove in
a hot swap rack yourself when the franken-box arrives.
As far as "easy" goes. There's probably no user that's not already
comfortable with shoving a bunch of disks into a normal PC that
would find a consumer NAS sufficiently easy.
These "appliances" are on the other side of that chasm already.
a 300W-400W pc cost $15 USD a month, not a year
I guess you have not priced a good SATA raid board lately have you? Im not talking about the generic one that came on your mother board - I'm talking about a real SATA raid card.
@Alan Strangis WHS doesn't seem to have any RAID options.
Yet another typical response to any NAS announcement. I could do it so much cheaper with a PC sitting in my living room. Ha!
You're missing the point (and I guess you haven't looked in detail at what QNAP etc offer)... I've had my QNAP TS-209 for 2 years, fault free, and it sits in the corner waiting for me to add a bunch off torrent files that it then proceeds to download the movies/music or whatever for, 24x7 natch, whilst it also delivers DLNA compliant media streams to whatever client, wirelessly, so for example I just switch on my PlayStation3, navigate a few menus and I'm watching one of a thousand movies or TV shows. I also have a Logitech Squeezebox that connects, again wirelessly, and plays me internet radio etc, or any of the 10,000+ tunes that sit on my QNAP (reading my shared iTunes database config for playlists etc). The built in web server automatically delivers my photo albums to my family over the internet, just by my dropping them into a folder. For backup, I have an external drive plugged in to one of the USB slots, and I hit one button on the front (or schedule a job using the admin tool). Loads more, including FTP server, remote admin etc etc..
And - Oh yeah... never configured a thing - all comes out of the box.
Keep your WHS mate, I'm happy being QNAP's target market.
Like the man said, you think it's expensive? Move along. And yes - you DON'T get it. :0P
If anybody here thinks leaving a computer on 24/7 will only cost them $14 a year in electricity they're either dreaming or have supplemental power sources going on.
The other advantage of a true RAID system is the effective storage to total storage ratio. With WHS if you duplicate folders you get 1/2 whereas if you have a 4 drive RAID setup you get 3/4.
The other thing that concerned me mostly with my WHS tests was that if the system drive goes down you have to reinstall the OS since there's no good backup method due to the way it handles the added disks. That was MS's recommendation. Their reasoning was that all your data was still on the hard drives within a certain folder and completely viewable. However all those files you had stored spread out among any of the drives you have added and it was a total bitch trying to compile them correctly again.
I'm leaning for a good NAS due to the power savings and maximum storage capacity.
$449 doesn't seem so low cost for a box that can read hard drives. Any old PC can do that
but are they as power efficient? Nope.
The most important feature is the dynamic RAID like drobo or Netgear's ReadyNAS has which allow user to use harddrive of different size and dynamically grow the NAS drive's capacity. This one didn't seemed to mention such raid feature.
which winhomeserver would do just as well, with any system you might build. still nice, that a NAS delivers that, too.
I think I would still pony up for the Atom Processor and more RAM. Since I would go with a RAID 5, that would help the performance a lot.
How is this better than the Asus Easystore? The Easystore is $399.99 MSRP (currently 379.99 at newegg http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16859321013&Tpk=easystore) and comes with a 1TB drive.
It has 4 drivers instead of just 1.
But I must say that the acer one is really sexy.
Thank you for the link.
I want a NAS but I will wait until the price tag should be above 300 for a 4 bay
Nehemoth - the Acer has 4 hard drive bays, just like this QNAP. The Acer just happens to unclude a 1TB drive at that price.
This also has a 1.6ghz atom and 2GB of RAM.
That Acer is a MUCH better deal than this. I have no idea how they can charge that much and not even include a drive
The QNAP does have one distinguishing feature, i.e the RAID support. If you lose one of the data drives on a WHS box, you lose some of the backup data. And if you don't have folder duplication enabled, you'll also lose data stored on it (as a network drive). And if you're unlucky enough to lose the system drive, you may have to set up the system again (i.e. setting up user accounts and backup options).
That said, WHS makes it laughably easy to restore a client PC from backup. It's so easy that last time I upgraded (replaced) a hard drive on a laptop, I didn't bother to use Acronis True Image. I just put the new drive in and did a recovery from the WHS backup. WHS also makes it very easy to access old backup files, e.g. if I delete a file by mistake.
@Nehemoth
You, as many others, mistake "ability" to install HDDs with "installed" HDDs. $450 is asked for "ability". $50 motherboard has the same ability.
Th QNAP is better because they paid Giz for the ad. :)
But you're right, that Acer is a better deal for a simple NAS. It has a better processor (atom), more ram (2G), included 1TB drive, runs WHS, and its cheaper.
If you think this is too expensive, it's not for you. Move along.
It's not a matter of 'expensive' as much as it is a matter of 'overpriced'.
The Acer Easystore beats it in every department. Price is lower, includes WHS, 2GB mem instead of 256MB, 1.6GHz Atom proc instead of 800MHz Marvell, and has 1TB storage included.
Acer had a promo where they threw in an extra 1TB for 2TB total when it launched, and last I looked (about 1 week ago), a couple of local retailers were still honouring it (Toronto - College St shops). If you do some searching, you might be able to find it still.
Even if you don't like WHS, you can always install whatever you want (I've experimented with FreeNAS by popping out the OS drive on my Easystore, but WHS actually does the trick more seamlessly for me - especially for the non-techies in the household).
I picked up their rack mount 419U turbo a while back and it has been pretty stable for the little while I have had it. I would like to see a little more transfer rate out of it (~23MB/s or so), but it has held up well so far for the price.
I have one of the Synology units and while I love it and it does nearly everything I want it too I will be switching to WHS soon for one major reason. Cheap over the internet backups. Services like Mozy, ElephantDrive, Carbonite, and a zillion others all have windows clients but do not allow backup of network drives without paying a huge premium for a business account. My cheap WHS will pay for it self in a few years on money saved on backups even with a higher electric bill. I will end up either selling my NAS or using it for local backups of my WHS box.
I was calculating how much it costs to build a server PC just the other day (no DVD, no video card, bare minimum).
I got $250. Add 2TB for $200 and there you have it - Core 2 Duo 2.5 ghz properly-cooled with 2gb ram, build-in video card, able to play HD videos and with 2TB storage (2x1TB). For $450. Instead of...
"800MHz Marvell processor, 256MB of DDR2 RAM, support for up to four 2.5-inch or 3.5-inch hard drives (no drives)". Which one would you choose?
Building Atom PC doesn't differ much even if you plan to use ION motherboard and 2-core Atom - you still get 2gb ram, 2TB and around $450-500 price.
So I don't get what QNAP asks $450 for.
A conventional Core-2 Duo box consumes a lot mower power than an Atom-based home server, and take up a lot more desk space (or shelf space). It also won't come with an operating system that makes it work as a backup device.
An Atom barebone computer with WHS makes a decent home server, but most Atom motherboards don't support 4 SATA hard drives. I found it cheaper to buy an Acer Easystore H340 home server.
The price of this product is absurd. The uP probably costs less than $20, and it only has 256MB of DRAM, which is what, $6 or so? A 4-channel SATA controller is only about $10-12, the power supply can't be more than $20, and the chassis, while nice, shouldn't cost more than $40. I know, it has "software", but it's probably 99% open source. This shouldn't cost more than $199, which would be commensurate with its performance (no doubt does RAID in software, which is going to slow this down, and won't even saturate a 100Mbps ethernet port).
If they were trying to sell this to banks or insurance companies, I could understand the price, but the anybody who understands what a NAS is should be smart enough to know this is grossly overpriced.
The Acer EasyStore is on H340 is on sale at frys for $330 if anyone was interested, only in-store though.
any in-store or just yours?
@krische "It's about less hassle". I understand the point you're making, since I ended up buying a Netgear ReadyNAS NV+ after many hassles with a cludged RAID array I built out of old kit I had laying around, with a ATA PCI RAID controller and LOOOOONG ribbon cables snaking out of the back of the machine to an external drive enclosure. Whenever the power would get cut, and the UPS would run out of juice, the array would split, and I've had to restore from backup. Plus there are the hassles of patching/rebooting a Windows box. I just wanted simplicity, and a device that just serves files. BUT! Not only is it about "less hassle", but when I'm getting less in the way of hardware, which this QNAP device is, I expect to pay less, and the $449 is hardly a deal for what you're getting.
I'm relatively disappointed with the 'ad', I mean article...
This weekend I spent a few hours building a new NAS using the Via Artigo A2000 and freenas. It only has 2 drive bays, but what a deal. $225 open box from Fry's. The best part is that it has a CF slot on the motherboard, so the OS can be independent of the data. According to the Kill-a-Watt, it, along with my my router and UPS draw 45 Watts at idle and about 65 during read/write cycles. Transfer speeds are fairly good, seeing about 200-230Mbps between my laptop and the NAS, but I think the laptop was struggling to keep up, not the NAS.
http://www.via.com.tw/en/products/embedded/artigo/a2000/index.jsp
http://www.freenas.org
So the QNAP has RAID 5, but less RAM (I installed 1GB, it will support 2). Seems a little expensive to me. Most of the time I spent was setting up the RAID, services and shares, something that would have to be done with this box as well, so I don't think there's really much time that would be saved. I guess hot swapping might be an advantage, but for a home server I don't think it would be essential. Hardware RAID might get you better throughput, but I had to upgrade the home network to GigE to see any major speed increase over my old Linksys slug anyway.
Still can't understand the price.
Hmmm, at work, we have one of these... going on about 8 months, the drives decided to take a major dump... not sure how much I would trust a Qnap device.
Read the blurb... then tell me how long it'll take you to install/configure all that on your WHS...
http://www.qnap.com/PressRelease_detail.asp?pr_id=160
This has been a very long debate, and one I read ALL the time on every forum.
Yes, you can build a homesystem using WHS, and yes you are likely to get features not found on these devices, but imo, NAS's are a great simple solution.
They are great at what they do because they're simple, efficient, they dont require frequent windows updates each week, you dont have to worry about updating drivers etc
I have a synology CS407 which did cost an arm and a leg, but its well worth it imo.
Its exactly the same debate, as to why buy a popcorn hour PC, when you can build a HTPC for the same sort of money?
I've been there and done that!
In my home AV setup, I want simplicity, not windows updates, regular crashes and constant driver updates.