INTRODUCTION

   Although NAS (Network Attached Storage) servers/devices were never actually ment to become a mainstream product for home use and were initially targeted towards office users, small/large businesses and enterprises today more and more people trust them not only to store and remotely share their data but also as media/web/download servers. Of course there's a great number of available NAS devices in the market from entry-levels ones that can be used for all the above mentioned functions up to high-end ones not only featuring very good hardware specifications but also a wealth of available functions (that's why i call them servers). Today we will be taking a thorough look into the high-end TurboNAS TS-259 Pro+ Dual Bay NAS by QNAP with small and medium businesses as its target group.

   QNAP Systems, Inc. is a privately held company founded in 2004 and is dedicated to bringing world class NAS storage, professional NVR video surveillance, and network video players to consumer, small/medium business, and entry level enterprise market segments. QNAP leverages not only hardware design but also a growing core competency in software engineering that is precisely focused on bringing to market products that offer the highest available performance coupled with outstanding reliability, scalability, and ease of installation and use. QNAP is a multi-national company with headquarters in Taipei, Taiwan, and subsidiary offices in China and the United States.

   Some people argue that the cost for a good NAS server is quite high and for people who already own a computer such a purchase is not the best use for their money. This may be somewhat accurate (although cheap NAS devices with basic functions do exist) however one must always take into consideration that the average computer uses around 200W just by sitting idly on desktop while a NAS server/device will never pass 30-35W even at load. That difference in electrical consumption is many KW (kilowatts) per month so for people who use their computer (example) for download purposes during several hours per day would most definitely benefit from a NAS device. Moving back to the TS-259 Pro+ by QNAP specs-wise it comes with a 1.8GHz dual-core Intel Atom processor, 1GB DDR3 RAM and 512MB of onboard flash memory so this particular mid/high-end model is not what I’d recommend to home users (for home use the TS-219P II is more suitable/cheaper) since this particular model also comes with several SMB specific features such as support for VMware and Citrix virtualization platforms, Windows Server 2008R2 Hyper-V & Failover clustering, iSCSI and 256-bit AES volume-based encryption. On paper the TurboNAS TS-259 Pro+ by QNAP seems like the ideal NAS server/device for small and medium businesses but it's time to find out just how good is it compared to the competition.