Date: September 25th, 2008
Article by: Jackie Mueller (Hardware Reviewer)
Edited by: Nathan Glentworth (Owner / Head Editor)
Product was submitted by: QNAP
<--SHOP FOR QNAP TS-509 NAS HERE
CONCLUSIONS AND AFTERTHOUGHTS
It's rare to come across a product that exceeds my expectations as much as this NAS did. Even excellent products usually have some minor issue that I come across during a review, but it was difficult to find anything negative at all to say about the TS-509. Everything about the setup was easy, from installing drives to configuring RAID to setting up the many additional features it offers. Once it was up and running, finding what I wanted was also easy due to the neatly organized interface. The inclusion of an LCD on this model adds to the convenience factor allowing basic functions and information to be viewed without a computer.
The ability to add up to five 1TB drives is certainly appealing as well, and out of all the NAS devices I've used this was the fastest to configure a RAID 5 array. The 1.6 GHz processor and 1GB of RAM mean that the TS-509 will be ready to go in a much shorter amount of time when compared to other NAS systems.
It would be easy to write several more pages about all the features that I didn't cover in this review. Things like the iTunes server, printer server, web server, MySQL server, Active Directory support, and multiple IP settings are just a few of the additional offerings this NAS provides.
All of this comes at a price of around $900, and that does not include any hard drives. For most home users that is too costly for a product has more features than are needed, but business users will find it to be a flexible, fast, and secure investment to handle that precious data that can't be lost.
Pros:
- Up to 5TB of storage possible
- Easy to set up and maintain
- LCD for basic functions
- Numerous features
- Quiet operation
- Two gigabit LAN ports
- Five USB ports
Cons:
- Expensive
If you have any further questions about this NAS, please feel free to post them in our forums HERE.
