QNAP TS-421 4-bay Consumer NAS Appliance Review

QNAP delivers a new consumer friendly firmware and a new consumer priced NAS appliance. The TS-421 brings enterprise features into the home.

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Manufacturer: QNAP
10 minutes & 22 seconds read time

Introduction

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Many of our daily readers at TweakTown see the small business NAS products and love the features, but just don't want to spend the big bucks. By now, everyone wants a NAS. Some people build their own with old PC components and others overspend for features they'll never use. There are very few high quality products on the market priced and designed specifically for a family.

QNAP has a long history of family friendly NAS appliances, but the user interface always based on SMB and enterprise products. After ten years of reviewing these types of produces, the SMB interface is second nature for me, but first time NAS buyers get frustrated with a massive list of options, most of which are foreign terms to those not versed in Ethernet technology.

To test a first time NAS users reaction, we sent one of our reviewers the QNAP TS-669L that we reviewed two months ago. He worked with the old 3.8 interface on the TS-669L and through remote desktop, worked on QNAPs new QTS 4.0 interface. The reaction was quite different for the two interface packages, even though the same settings are present in both, just laid out in a different manner.

This review isn't about the new QTS 4.0 user interface, Tyler is working on a separate article for the software and it should be on TweakTown soon. Today we're looking at the new TS-421 NAS that's designed for a family in the home. Let's take a look at the specifications first on the next page.

Hardware Specifications and Pricing

Modern NAS servers have moved beyond data storage through a wire network. In order to get the most out of a NAS, you need to look at the extra I/O hardware and the mountain of potential software features.

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At the heart of the TS-421 is a 2GHz Marvell processor optimized for low power and fed by 1GB of DDR3 DRAM. The DRAM is soldered to the motherboard, so you can't add more DRAM to the system. This reduces the overall cost of the TS-421. Nearly every other feature beyond the CPU and fixed DRAM is carried over from QNAP's higher priced products.

There are four hot swap drive bays keyed for either 3.5" or 2.5" form factor drives. Two external eSATA ports on the back of the NAS increase overall data capacity, beyond the 16TB available by internal storage. Three USB ports on the back of the NAS (two USB 3.0) further increase connectivity. The single USB 2.0 port on the front of the NAS has a unique data one touch copy button, making USB storage backup to the NAS very easy.

Two gigabyte Ethernet ports allow the NAS to connect to your network and from there your computers, TVs, Wi-Fi devices like smartphones and so on. If you happen to have an enterprise switch, you can run the NAS in 802.3ad mode to increase bandwidth to the client systems.

QNAP has a few other options that don't require an enterprise switch that can either increase bandwidth or add redundancy to the network. Another option is if you have two separate networks, the NAS can connect to both without issue.

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QNAP released another product at the same time as the TS-421. The QNAP TS-420 uses a slower processor, has half of the DRAM and doesn't ship with the LED screen. The TS-420 costs roughly $70 less at Newegg.

The TS-421 that we're looking at today currently costs $499 at Newegg, but we managed to find it for $480 through Google shopping results. Moving up through the current QNAP product line, the TS-469L is the SMB model with an Intel Atom 2.13GHz processor and 1GB of DRAM.

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Included with the NAS is an Ethernet cable, paper quick installation guide, power cord, power brick and screws for mounting drives in the NAS. You also get access to QNAP's resources page that added functionality to the NAS. Let's take a look at the software package and add-ons for the new QTS 4.0 firmware.

Software Features

NAS products are equal parts hardware performance and software features. One compliments the other in a balanced product. You need more hardware performance to run more software features at the same time.

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The kitchen sink and automatic car wash options are extra. In all seriousness, the TS-421 includes more software and functions than even a large business will ever need. Of course, with a unit like the TS-421, being able to turn these functions on is just as important as having them.

Let's take a look at the packaging and hardware on the next page, and then see the new user interface.

Packaging

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QNAP put together an informative package for the TS-421. This is a full retail design for stores like Fry's and Microcenter.

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Bits of information, usage and specs are on every side of the package.

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Even with all of the information given, QNAP still couldn't fit it all on the package.

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The power supply is an external units, sometimes called a power brick. This reduces the temperature inside the NAS.

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Here we see the other included accessories. The specifications on QNAP's website stated a single Ethernet cable, but our package shipped with two. The power cable and two packs of mounting screws included are shown above.

QNAP TS-421

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Here we get our first look at the QNAP TS-421. The TS-420 looks identical other than the LCD screen behind the tinted window and the control buttons to the right of the screen. There are four easy to access drive sleds just under the screen. On the lower left side is the power and USB copy button that surrounds the USB 2.0 port.

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The copy function is quite impressive for a consumer market device. To use the feature, you just plug your thumb drive or external storage into the port and hit the copy button. The data copy goes to a specific folder on the NAS and then you can access it from your other devices.

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This side of the NAS has a vent to keep the processor and RAM cool. The TS-421 has a small footprint, so it will fit easily on a shelf or on top of a file cabinet.

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The TS-421 has a quiet fan that keeps the NAS and the HDDs inside cool. Along the right side of the 421 is where we found the I/O ports. Two eSATA ports at the top, then two gigabit Ethernet ports, two USB 3.0 ports, a single USB 2.0 port and finally the connector for power.

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The display shows more than just a welcome message. You can use the display and configuration buttons to set your NAS IP and several other settings.

Configuration Menus

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The main menu for the TS-421 with QNAP's new QTS 4.0 software is very easy to navigate. Before you get to this point though you need to configure a few settings like user name, date and time, time zone and so on.

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Mouse over to enlarge.

Test System Setup

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Our NAS test 'system' has migrated to a full 45u rack like what you'd find in a datacenter. There are ten servers that attack the target NAS with 120 Hyper-V installations of Windows 7 64-bit, each with a dedicated gigabit Ethernet port. The systems feed to three Extreme Networks Summit 400-48 switches that link together via Extreme Network's proprietary link cable system. One switch has a two 10GbE Xenpak adapters installed. When testing NAS products with 10GbE capability, the NAS connects to the switch via single or dual 10GbE courtesy of an Intel X520-SR2 installed in the NAS.

This level of testing wouldn't be possible without the help and support from several companies, many of which have little to do with NAS products. We would like to thank AVADirect, Antec, Corsair, GIGABYTE, Icy Dock, Kingston, LSI, Noctua, Rosewill and Western Digital for their much-appreciated support.

Intel NASPT

The Intel NAS Performance Toolkit (NASPT) is a file system exerciser and analysis tool designed to enable direct measurement of home network attached storage (NAS) performance. Designed to emulate the behavior of an actual application, NASPT uses a set of real-world workload traces gathered from typical digital home applications. Traces of high definition video playback and recording, office productivity applications, video rendering/content creation and more provide a broad range of different application behaviors.

TweakTown Custom 120-Client Office Test

The TweakTown Custom 120-client Office Test uses 120 Windows 7 Hyper-V installations and custom software to stress each NAS with traces from Microsoft Office tasks. Both throughput (in Mbits per second) and latency (in milliseconds) are measured.

Western Digital RED - The NAS HDD

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TweakTown uses Western Digital RED 1TB hard drives for all of our NAS tests. You can read our full review of the Western Digital RED 1TB here.

Benchmarks - 1 HDD / JBOD

JBOD: A single or combined multiple drives and capacities linked together to form a single drive.

Note - No Data Redundancy

HD Video Playback

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HD Video Play - 720p HD stream from Windows Media Player* 256kB reads

2HD Video Play - 2x playback

4HD Video Play - 4x playback

HD Video Record

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HD Video Record - 720p HD stream, 256kB writes

HD Video Play & Record - 1 playback, 1 record simultaneously

2x HD Video Play & 2x Record - 2 playback, 2 record simultaneously

Content Creation

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Photo Album - All reads - wide distribution of sizes

Office Productivity - Reads and writes, 1kB & 4kB reads; Mostly 1kB writes

Content Creation - 95% writes; 1k, 4k & little reads; Writes up to 64kB

File / Directory Transfer

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Directory Copy From NAS - 64kB reads

Directory Copy To NAS - Predominantly 64kB writes, wide scattering under 16kB

File Copy From NAS - 4GB file copy, 64kB reads

File Copy To NAS - 64kB writes

Benchmarks - 4 HDD / RAID 0

RAID 0: Normally used to increase performance and useful for setups such as large read-only NFS servers where mounting many disks is time-consuming or impossible and redundancy is irrelevant.

HD Video Playback

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HD Video Play - 720p HD stream from Windows Media Player* 256kB reads

2HD Video Play - 2x playback

4HD Video Play - 4x playback

HD Video Record

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HD Video Record - 720p HD stream, 256kB writes

HD Video Play & Record - 1 playback, 1 record simultaneously

2x HD Video Play & 2x Record - 2 playback, 2 record simultaneously

Content Creation

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Photo Album - All reads - wide distribution of sizes

Office Productivity - Reads and writes, 1kB & 4kB reads; Mostly 1kB writes

Content Creation - 95% writes; 1k, 4k & little reads; Writes up to 64kB

File / Directory Transfer

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Directory Copy From NAS - 64kB reads

Directory Copy To NAS - Predominantly 64kB writes, wide scattering under 16kB

File Copy From NAS - 4GB file copy, 64kB reads

File Copy To NAS - 64kB writes

Benchmarks - 4 HDD / RAID 10

RAID 10: A Stripe of Mirrors. Multiple RAID 1 mirrors are created and a RAID 0 stripe is created over these.

HD Video Playback

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HD Video Play - 720p HD stream from Windows Media Player* 256kB reads

2HD Video Play - 2x playback

4HD Video Play - 4x playback

HD Video Record

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HD Video Record - 720p HD stream, 256kB writes

HD Video Play & Record - 1 playback, 1 record simultaneously

2x HD Video Play & 2x Record - 2 playback, 2 record simultaneously

Content Creation

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Photo Album - All reads - wide distribution of sizes

Office Productivity - Reads and writes, 1kB & 4kB reads; Mostly 1kB writes

Content Creation - 95% writes; 1k, 4k & little reads; Writes up to 64kB

File / Directory Transfer

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Directory Copy From NAS - 64kB reads

Directory Copy To NAS - Predominantly 64kB writes, wide scattering under 16kB

File Copy From NAS - 4GB file copy, 64kB reads

File Copy To NAS - 64kB writes

Benchmarks - 4 HDD / RAID 5

RAID 5: Use block-level striping with parity data distributed across all member disks.

HD Video Playback

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HD Video Play - 720p HD stream from Windows Media Player* 256kB reads

2HD Video Play - 2x playback

4HD Video Play - 4x playback

HD Video Record

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HD Video Record - 720p HD stream, 256kB writes

HD Video Play & Record - 1 playback, 1 record simultaneously

2x HD Video Play & 2x Record - 2 playback, 2 record simultaneously

Content Creation

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Photo Album - All reads - wide distribution of sizes

Office Productivity - Reads and writes, 1kB & 4kB reads; Mostly 1kB writes

Content Creation - 95% writes; 1k, 4k & little reads; Writes up to 64kB

File / Directory Transfer

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Directory Copy From NAS - 64kB reads

Directory Copy To NAS - Predominantly 64kB writes, wide scattering under 16kB

File Copy From NAS - 4GB file copy, 64kB reads

File Copy To NAS - 64kB writes

Benchmarks - 4 HDD / RAID 6 and Single Client Wrap-up

Benchmarks - 4 HDD / RAID 6

RAID 6: Extend RAID 5 by adding an additional parity block; thus it uses block-level striping with two parity blocks distributed across all member disks.

HD Video Playback

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HD Video Play - 720p HD stream from Windows Media Player* 256kB reads

2HD Video Play - 2x playback

4HD Video Play - 4x playback

HD Video Record

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HD Video Record - 720p HD stream, 256kB writes

HD Video Play & Record - 1 playback, 1 record simultaneously

2x HD Video Play & 2x Record - 2 playback, 2 record simultaneously

Content Creation

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Photo Album - All reads - wide distribution of sizes

Office Productivity - Reads and writes, 1kB & 4kB reads; Mostly 1kB writes

Content Creation - 95% writes; 1k, 4k & little reads; Writes up to 64kB

File / Directory Transfer

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Directory Copy From NAS - 64kB reads

Directory Copy To NAS - Predominantly 64kB writes, wide scattering under 16kB

File Copy From NAS - 4GB file copy, 64kB reads

File Copy To NAS - 64kB writes

Single Client Performance Wrap-up

I haven't reviewed a true consumer level NAS like the TS-421 for a long time.

All of the other units on the single user charts use Intel Atom processors and some even cost twice as much as the TS-421. The 421 delivers a solid user experience at RAID 5 where most users should set the NAS at.

The HD video playback performance of 50 MB/s is strong enough to watch a Blu-ray ISO across the network. The 4x HD playback performance of 40 MB/s means four different TVs can play HD content at the same time, all off of the TS-421.

Final Thoughts

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We get many questions about NAS appliances after we publish reviews of small business products. A majority of the questions are about price. At $499 the QNAP TS-421 isn't exactly low cost and it certainly isn't cheap. I wouldn't call the TS-421 an entry-level NAS either since it's packed with many of the same features as QNAP's more expensive parts.

That leads us to the Marvell 2.0GHz CPU at the heart of the TS-421. Clearly it isn't as strong as the Intel Atom processor, but it's fast enough to deliver high definition content to more than one location at the same time.

The Atom powered machines were built to deliver HD content while running SQL with 20+ users connected at the same time. In our single client tests, we still see some performance differences, but when it comes to equal drive bay count units, the differences aren't that great.

I'm really not sure what I'm more excited about, the TS-421 bringing good consumer performance or the new QTS 4.0 software that makes the unit easier to use. Setting up the TS-421 was very easy, the wizard walks you through the initial setup and everything after that is setup logically. Being able to get to your files and folders just by typing //name_of_nas is one of the easiest ways to increase productivity that I can think of.

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