INTRODUCTION

   As the popularity of NAS devices (or NAS servers as we like to call them) keeps increasing every day naturally many of you expect from us to focus in getting some of the latest models to hit the market from all the major players for testing purposes. Well lately we've seen the introduction of not only expensive models designed and manufactured by both old and new companies with business customers as their main target audience but also low and mid-end ones developed mostly for house and office use. That being said with the current state of HDD prices it really doesn't come as a surprise to see that consumers are not as interested in single bay models as they are in dual and quad ones and who can blame them since having at least one more available bay for future expansion is the obvious choice. So for the past two weeks we've been putting the latest quad bay NAS server to hit the market by QNAP the TurboNAS TS-420 through rigorous testing to see if it has what it takes to win the hearts of home and office users.

   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.

   Much like with most home & soho oriented NAS servers the TurboNAS TS-420 does not come with stellar hardware specifications and so under its hood QNAP has placed a Marvell Kirkwood 88F6282 SoC single core CPU running at 1.6GHz along with 512MB of DDR3 memory. The CPU used is actually capable of clocks of up to 2GHz (1.6/1.8/2.0GHz) but that's also the main difference between the TS-420 and the slightly better (and more expensive) TS-421 released at around the same time. Other hardware features include two rear eSATA connectors, two USB 3.0 ports, two USB 2.0 and two Gigabit Ethernet ports so as you can see although the TS-420 is a home & small office oriented model it still offers much in terms of connectivity. Now although the TurboNAS TS-420 gets shipped with the 3.8.2 firmware inside we used the latest version of the QNAP Turbo Station (4.0.2) which is quite easier to navigate compared to previous versions and also a lot better looking. Finally as usual QNAP offers quite a few Android/iOS Apps from where you can check the state of the NAS and also control many of its functions but since we've already covered them in many reviews in the past this time over we decided to skip them at least until a new feature or version comes along. So the time has come to see exactly what you can expect from the latest 4bay TurboNAS TS-420 by QNAP.