Recently an oppurtunity came up to buy another NAS unit, the QNAP TS-409 Pro, from a friend at work for a good price, so after quick thought and some research (more than I had done for the Icybox!), I snapped it up.  And after a month of use, I havent regretted it.  It’s a four drive SOHO (prosumer, maybe) backup solution which currently has 4x 500GB drives in a RAID5 configuration.

The best things:

• Gigabit network connectivity (realworld gigabit, this time (20 – 40MB/s, much better than the 5 – 10MB/s from the Icybox)
• 4x SATA Bays capable of RAID0, 1, 5, 6 and JBOD configs
• Inbuilt media, iTunes, music streaming server
• Torrent/HTTP queue downloader
• NSLU2 support with iPKG management (basic linux OS with Debian like package installer).
• FTP/Samba/NFS/HTTP file access
• support for USB drives/keys and one touch/scheduled backup of core files, either from the unit itself or from locations around the local network.
• and a whole bunch of other features like web server, database, time server etc etc.

I’m especially interested in the IPKG manager and NSLU2 based linux console as it really closes the gap between useless (or limited use) network device, and fully configurable server or computer, and I’ve got a bunch of scheduled tasks UnRAR’ing downloads, backing up photos and documents, rebuilding/exporting the music collection and downloading new album artwork and doing other system and network diagnostic tasks.  Infinitely useful!

Nothings perfect though, and it can’t all be good, in the case of the QNAP, its loud as hell and building the initial RAID array took a fair few hours but that’s to be expected, and under the circumstances, I think I can let it pass.