Review: QNAP TS-109 Pro II

I bit the bullet and bought a SOHO-level / entry-level NAS unit for the home office. I reviewed several units online for the past month or so and finally decided that the QNAP TS-109 Pro II did everything I’d need.

“But Ian,” you say. “You run Linux, why not do it all there?”

Frankly, the recent fires around Los Angeles, and paranoid need to keep stuff backed up and immediately packable should we ever need to evacuate, plus the need to organize our digital life a little at home, all culminated in this purchase. The last time I changed anything on my home network, Samba broke (badly) and shared files and printing capability got kinda hosed.

For $320, the NAS unit has a wealth of features that ultimately came cheaper than buying a whole machine to manage:
- gigabit interface
- two USB ports on the back, one will be used for the printer so we’ll have proper print sharing on our machines
- eSATA port on the back which I’ll use in the near future for mirroring the data on the NAS in RAID fashion
- USB port on the front with a button above it that copies all files from whatever device you plug in (like our digital camera), and copies the files into a unique folder name on the enclosed drive
- runs embedded linux and formats the internal drive as ext3, so hard symlinks have become my new best friend for getting rid of duplicate files on the drive while giving Elizabeth and I the flexibility to store our music/photos how we each see fit.
- only runs at 14W at maximum usage — far cheaper to run this than a full system with a 300W or 400W power supply.
- no fan, so the only noise it makes is from the hard drive
- Samba functionality is very seamless on my wife’s Windows PC, and the Pro version has NFS capability for mounting somewhat more natively on my Linux workstation.

For another $129 ($99 after rebate), I picked up a duplicate Hitachi DeskStar 1TB drive that I’ve currently got in my workstation — once I get files moved to the NAS unit, I’ll ask Santa for an eSATA enclosure to plug into the TS-109 to set up RAID mirroring of the data.

It’ll be nice to have this unit available on the network (though all 4 ports on my wireless router are now completely full), which will also give me the flexibility to dual-boot my workstation into Windows from time to time, though I rarely have any free time to do any gaming whatsoever. But at least the headaches of configuring Samba for file/printer sharing are all taken care of with this box.

A really great, really long review of the unit is at this URL:
http://www.bjorn3d.com/read.php?cID=1137&pageID=

The unit has plenty of other features like an iTunes server, a photo slideshow engine, a built-in web server with PHP, MySQL and SQLite, and opkg for package updates. Oh yeah, and a bittorrent client built in to download torrent files for you in case you want to shut off your computer.

Setup of the unit was pretty simple, though there’s no option to configure it for Linux, you need a Mac or Windows machine to install the initial setup software, though in retrospect, I probably could have accessed it via its web browser to configure everything.

The longest part of the setup was letting it format the 1TB drive as ext3 — it took about 20 minutes — then I mounted a few of the folders onto my wife’s PC:
Z:\ is the Public folder where we can share files with each other
Y:\ is the copied-from-USB folder where we’ll retrieve camera photos and anything from a USB key drive
X:\ is a ‘multimedia’ folder where we’ll put our music and photos.

As I mentioned, Elizabeth and I store our photos and music entirely differently. Elizabeth has stated several times, no joking intended, that she’d rather share a toothbrush than share a hard drive.

With hard symlinks, the underlying file system will only store one copy of a file, but make it accessible as many times as we need to. Soft symlinks don’t give the same functionality, and Windows doesn’t seem to handly soft symlinks well over the network.

So now I can simply move all of our music into /artist/album/song.mp3 folders, hard symlink the same structure to a music folder I created for her, and she can move the files via Windows into /year/genre/artist-song.mp3 or whatever format she wants. Though my suspicion is that she uses the Zune software to manage all of her files now so she probably doesn’t even care where the music lives. But the other nice thing is that we’ll have copies of all of the music on the NAS for ourselves, and we can delete whichever music files we don’t want to keep — for example, I’m not as big a fan of her swing music, and she hates most of my music, but there’s a lot of overlap like 80′s rock, the Wicked soundtrack, stress-relief music, etc.

Photos can be managed the same way, though since our Sony camera has reset the filename counter a few times, we’ll have several copies of files like DSC00001.JPG which I’ll need to figure out … I’ll probably work something out with MD5 checksums to determine which photos are duplicated, and sort them by content. Does anybody know if there’s an f-spot equivalent for Windows, or should we both start using Picassa or something to tag our photos?

As I use the drive more, I’ll write another review in a couple of weeks, but so far I’m extremely happy. The only drawback I’ve found so far is typical of any external hard drive — you’re limited by the connection. Even with a gigabit network, copying music and photos from my wife’s PC at the same time as copying about 15GB of files from my PC, plus testing the USB-device-copy to pull photos and video off our camera, slowed the little unit to a crawl. Then again, it’s only got a 500MHz CPU and 256MB of RAM, so I’m sure I taxed it pretty hard last night. Under typical usage, I’m sure it’ll perform just fine.

I’ll also share any scripts I write for detecting duplicates or symlinking files.