INTRODUCTION

   Roughly 5 months ago i had the opportunity to visit one of the largest data centers in the world (located inside the EU) and needless to say the moment i stepped in their quite massive installation i was overwhelmed not only by their amount of servers and drive arrays (actually they use HDDs, SSDs and flash drives) but also by their local data transfer speeds (40GbE anyone?) and extreme cooling methods (did you know that they even use warm water for cooling?). Anyways when i got back to our "lab" (can hardly even call it that after experiencing what i did) i decided to perform several upgrades the first of which had to do with our NAS testing methodology since 1GbE has been maxed out for years now. Well the next "obvious" step was for us to implement 10GbE testing (40GbE is the next step, don't know the when however) and a couple of weeks ago we finished "gathering" all the necessary components. Having the hardware however is not enough so the very first NAS server to make use of that is the brand new TVS-871U-RP-i3-4G by our very good friends over at QNAP.

   QNAP Systems, Inc., as its brand promise "Quality Network Appliance Provider", aims to deliver comprehensive offerings of cutting edge network attached storage (NAS) and network video recorder (NVR) solutions featured with ease-of-use, robust operation, large storage capacity, and trustworthy reliability. QNAP integrates technologies and designs to bring forth quality products that effectively improve business efficiency on file sharing, virtualization applications, storage management and surveillance in the business environments, as well as enrich entertainment life for home users with the offering of a fun multimedia center experience. Headquartered in Taipei, QNAP delivers its solutions to the global market with nonstop innovation and passion.

   When we got the TurboNAS TS-469U-RP from QNAP roughly 4 years ago it was our first real encounter with a rack mount NAS server (one which we could actually test) and largely thanks to its excellent performance, height (wide and long but quite thin) and dual power supply units (redundant power supply feature) it earned a permanent place in our lab ever since. That however was then and so the brand new TVS-871U-RP-i3-4G is much more advanced compared to the TS-469U-RP in more areas than even we would expect. So this time over under the hood we see a powerful dual-core Intel Core i3-4150 processor running at 3.5GHz, 4GB DDR3 RAM running at 1600MHz (four slots expandable to 32GB), 512MB flash DOM and two mSATA ports for read cashing (for use with mSATA SSDs). We also have 8 SATA III hot-swappable bays, 4 USB 3.0 ports, 4 USB 2.0 ports, 4 Gigabit RJ-45 Ethernet ports, two PCIe expansion slots (x8/x4) and of course two switching power supplies (250W each). QNAP also makes the TVS-871U-RP available in two more flavors one with a slightly less powerful dual-core Intel Pentium G3250 processor running at 3.1GHz and one with a more powerful quad-core Intel Core i5-4590S processor running at 3GHz and with 8GB of DDR3 RAM right out of the box.