INTRODUCTION

   For the largest part of the consumer base 3.5" desktop drives represent the best value since they are currently available with capacities all the way up to 8TB (single drive models) and in most cases are even cheaper compared to their 3.5" internal counterparts. There are however many people out there (primarily professionals) who want more and for them there are three choices to go about currently. They can either use a external tower enclosure which can house up to 12 drives, use an rackmount enclosure with room for up to 48 drives or use a NAS with room for as many as 24 drives (and if that's not enough there are always expansion models available). Now if you're willing to spend close to USD800 or more for a standalone multi-drive enclosure chances are you'll take the NAS route instead since it features a plethora of usages and can even be used without the need for a PC or MAC. For such demanding consumers QNAP recently released their rather "affordable" TurboNAS TS-1635 16 bay NAS server and today we're taking it for a spin.

   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.

   The TurboNAS TS-1635 is a very large NAS server which under the hood features the Annapurna AL-514 quad-core Cortex-A15 CPU clocked at 1.7GHz along with 4/8GB DDR3L RAM (upgradable to 16GB), 512MB of DOM flash memory, PCIe Gen2 (x2) slot (for an extra NIC), 16 SATA 6Gb/s drive bays (12x2.5/3.5" & 4x2.5"), two 10GbE SFP+ LAN ports, 2 Gigabit RJ45 LAN ports, 3 USB 3.0 ports, built-in speaker and a line out port. You can of course configure all 16 bays of the TurboNAS TS-1635 in single, JBOD and RAID 0/1/5/6/10 + hot spare modes with AES 256-bit data encryption. Just like with other models by QNAP if by any chance the 16 SATA 6Gb/s bays are not enough to cover your needs in the long run you can expand the storage capacity of the unit with one of the available expansion models (UX-500P/UX-800P). Unfortunately the TurboNAS TS-1635 doesn't feature an HDMI output so you can't use it as a high-end media server (KODI) nor can you use one of the several applications available through it but aside that it has pretty much everything we're used in seeing with the top of the line models by QNAP.