QNAP TS-869U-RP 8-Bay Rackmount NAS Review

With this being our first glance into the rackmount market, QNAP have given us a great entry level view as to what is available. As we have seen , the performance that we have seen here from the TS869U-RP is very much on par with its desktop counterpart, the TS869 Pro. As you would expect, there is only a limited amount of detail we can go into the systems design as rackmount systems are generically all of the same scale and dimensions. The little touch of the gloss black strip along the front adds a little highlight to the system, but also conveniently hides away the screen from view when its not in use.

The key focus on any system is it performance. Right back at the start of the review, I said that was expecting this to perform on par with the TS869 Pro due to their losely similar specifications and even given the fact that we now run all test data through our core network, the performance offered is bang on where I expected it to be. Naturally as more concurrent connections are made and in larger deployments when more powerful systems would and may be required with higher models of rackmount and desktop systems offering up both Xeon CPUs and in some cases 10GBe connectivity as well for extreme levels of performance on respect to what we have seen to date.

One point that we have noted here is that the rails required to mount the NAS into a suitable cabinet are not included and have to be purchased separately. This is one thing that we would expect to be supplied, however with a few slight variations in rack design, selling these separate does allow for the right combination to be ordered together.

When we look at the price compared to the desktop equivalent, the jump is quite substantial, however rackmount systems are on a completely different level to SOHO and entry level SMB systems with them offering the obvious rackmount capability but other important features such as redundant power supplies for mission critical environments where uptime is vital.

On the whole I’m very impressed with the TS869U-RP and granted there is the downside that you have to buy the required rails separately. For SMB users that want to consolidate all their data into a single point and at the same time reduce their spacial footprint by perhaps for the first time investing in rackmount servers, the TS869U-RP is a great entry level step onto the rackmount NAS market.