Qnap TS-412-US 4-Bay USB 2.0 NAS Server

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Price: $365.24 $360.07   

Product Feature

• CPU Marvell 6281 1.2GHz
• DRAM 256MB DDRII RAM
• Flash Memory 16MB
• Hard Disk Drive 4 x 3.5" or 2.5" SATA I/II hard disk drive (HDD)
• HDD Tray 4 x hot-swappable tray
• Flexible multiple LUNs management
• LAN Port 2 x Gigabit RJ-45 Ethernet port
• LED Indicators Status, LAN, USB, eSATA, HDD 1, HDD 2, HDD 3, HDD 4
• NAS + iSCSI storage solution
• Secure IP SAN environment deployment

Product Description

Introducing the QNAP TS-412 NAS server for home use, an easy to use networked storage center for the ultimate digital home entertainment experience. QNAP Turbo NAS servers are a new approach for sharing digital photos, music, and movies/videos, and keeping home computers backed up. You can easily view photos, listen to music, and even watch Full HD 1080p movies on a widescreen TV or projector streamed from the NAS over the network through PS3, Xbox 360, or other network media players. You can share multimedia content with family and friends wherever they are on the Internet by web browsers. iPhone/iPod touch/iPad and Android users can browse shared photos or listen to their music collections anywhere with 3G or Wi-Fi connection by streaming content directly to the device no sync required. QNAP NAS brings to life the ultimate in digital home theater enjoyment.

Qnap TS-412-US 4-Bay USB 2.0 NAS Server Review

This is the first NAS, I have ever owned. I did a lot of research and was undecided between Synology 411j and QNAP and then between QNAP 412, 419P+ or 439s. Kept changing my budget from anywhere between $360 to $660 as you can see from the range of products I was looking at.

My usage is of a typical home user. I set out with the following goals:
- Be able to stream up to 1080P media to few machines and TV at home.
- Put up a personal cloud for browsing my content on road.
- Android/iPhone support.
- Provide WAN access to my parents and sister to view my media.
- Have good and granular user level control over the shared stuff.
- More storage (3TB support) per bay. Don't have many old hard drives lying around that made sense even with Synology's SHR, so although SHR looked good on paper but was personally not a big point for me.
- Hot swap capability. Again only during your initial testing phase you may make more use of this.
- And at some time in future play around with iSCSI, VDD, setting up web server etc, just to satisfy the engineer in me :)

TS-412 has accomplished each task and much more with aplomb !!

Things I have tried and have worked well :

HARDWARE/FIRMWARE
- Did firmware update from installed 3.3.9 to 3.5 as soon as the device came.
- Installed WD30EZRX - Western Digital's 3TB Green Drive (on sale these days) and officially NOT IN SUPPORTED LIST on Qnap's site.
- The drive is working well and stays around 32C temp. Since it is NOT an enterprise drive, I have used Qnap's power management features to spin down these drives after 20min of no activity and to shut down the system from 1AM to 8 AM. We'll see if this helps.
- I have for now just started with a single volume; NO RAID. Backup happening on my external USB.

MEDIA RELATED
- XBox/XBMC using SMB share on NAS worked flawlessly on Wifi N and Wired. Wireless G connection showed some hiccups.
- XBox/XBMC using Upnp/TwonkyMedia stream worked smoothly even with Wifi G connection.
- Android/iPhone using QMobile (Qnaps app) works great for music and photos. Plays only some videos that your device supports.
- To play VOBs, MKVs etc I had to use MediaHouse (https://market.android.com/details?id=com.dbapp.android.mediahouse) + BSPlayer lite app on the device. This was a big win and not to mention the cool wow factor with friends !! These apps are free compared to the twonky media mobile app.
- NOTE: One of the reasons for thinking to buy TS439 was because of intel processor and PMS - PS3 Media Server support on it. Twonky Media server hasn't dissapointed me so far. With my setup now, trans-coding on the fly (inside NAS) is NOT required, so you don't need a beefier machine.

MY CLOUD
- Was a let down. It only supports UpnP routers so it was never able to configure the AT&T UVerse router automatically for me. I gave my NAS a static IP on my lan. I logged to the router myself and forwarded port 80 and 443 to my NAS's static IP. Then I went to [...] and got my public IP. Use your public ip:8080 and voila you'll see your NAS :)
MULTIMEDIA STATION (MMS)
- Love the granular user control on who gets to see what. Create users in QNAP User Management, Login as admin in MMS and choose which folder you want the user to see. That's it. Then give your public ip/MSV2 link to the user and he/she can see your media from WAN. My parents are enjoying my media from their house now :).

SPEEDS
- Copying movies I was getting (40MB/sec write and 80MB/sec read). Who wouldn't like more speeds? But then evaluate the cost vs. performance aspect and for 15MB/sec gain (what I have heard for TS 419P+), I wasn't ready to pay $125 more. Copying 2TB of movies on to this NAS over Gbit wired connection took me a good 10hrs. On 419P+ it could have taken me ~8, may be, but at these numbers you are anyways talking about running this over night.
- As pointed earlier you will NOT notice any speed issues when it comes to streaming to couple of machines in either case.

So far extremely pleased with this purchase. For the first time during a purchase I questioned myself on getting what "I need" vs. what "I can afford" and this machine is more than enough for a home users need.

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