Introduction

At CES Cameron and I paid a visit to QNAP's booth to take a look at several new NAS appliances and servers the company launched at the show. Little did we know that the new product lineup would be so extensive, almost a top to bottom refresh. The first of the new dual core Intel Atom products has been here for a month now and I have to come right out and say that I am very impressed. It is a good thing too since the TS-419P TurboNAS we reviewed last year didn't fare as well as we were hoping.

Even though the TS-419P and TS-459 look nearly identical outside, the two are completely different inside. The 419P used a Marvell processor and in our testing we felt that it and the firmware held the NAS back from performing as well as it could have. The latest run of firmware from QNAP and the new dual core Atom processor have now cleared those issues, but it comes at a higher initial cost to users. We will touch more on the cost and the additional productivity in the conclusion.

As with all QNAP NAS appliances, the TS-459 TurboNAS has an extensive feature list that includes some of the most desired software features in the industry. A new feature that has been added is VMWare Certification that adds support for vSphere ESX 4.0 and above.

Let's take a look at the specifications and add-on package then get to the data transfer rates that are truly spectacular.