INTRODUCTION

   As time goes by more and more of you ask me about my opinion surrounding NAS units and more specifically which ones i consider to offer the best bang for your buck. Things however are never black and white when we are talking about technology so in the end it all comes down to what your needs are and how much you are willing to spend on it. So if you just want to buy a NAS Server to use just as a download station then even the entry-level Qnap TS-119P II (review soon) will be more than enough for that purpose so there's really no need for you to spend much. On the other hand if you want an NAS Server for multiple usages, for example use as a download station, media station, FTP server and webserver then you would do well to choose something more powerful like the Qnap TS-219P II. Performance however is only part of what makes a NAS server and so aside you deciding what use you need it for you also need to know how many drives bays you may require. Up until today we have mostly focused on 2 and 4 bay mid-end solutions but since many of you asked today we will be taking a look at the latest TurboNAS TS-469 Pro which as the name suggests is the latest high-end 4bay mid-end (SMB) solution from QNAP.

   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.

       Appearance wise the QNAP TurboNAS TS-469 Pro is almost identical to the TS-419P II I had the chance to test a while back but that’s just about the end of their similarities since the TS-469 Pro packs a much more powerful punch, specs-wise. So this time over we see an dual core Atom processor running at 2.13GHz, 1GB DDR3 RAM running at 1333MHz (expandable to 3GB), 512MB of flash memory and SATA III (6Gb/s) connectivity for all 4 drive bays which can in turn be used in various configurations such as single, JBOD, RAID 0, 1, 5, 5 + Hot Spare, 6, 6 + Hot Spare, 10, and 10 + Hot Spare. SATA III connectivity is something I’ve wanted to see for a while with SMB solutions and finally QNAP did it.