THE XCUBENAS XN8008T

Measuring 310mm in length, 235mm in width and 177mm in height the XCubeNAS XN8008T is identical to the XN5008T model.

At the front we see the illuminated (activity LEDs) power on/off and USB copy buttons, USB 3.0 port and 8 drive bays with individual activity LEDs (blue) over each one.

 Each drive tray features a lock which can be used with the bundled plastic key.

All trays are made out of hard plastic and feature tool-less mechanisms for 3.5" drives (2.5" ones require screws).

Once again in order to access the RAM and the 2.5" tray you will need to remove the service door and to do that you will need to push this tiny button located on the left side of the enclosure (you can use the bundled key for that as well).

Here we find the two DDR4 SO-DIMM slots (taken by two 8GB modules clocked at 2400MHz in our sample) and a 2.5" drive tray (SSD caching).

Unlike the large 3.5" trays this is not what I’d call sturdy but it gets the job done.

Moving at the rear we find the AC power port, two 120mm exhaust fans, Thunderbolt 3 card (sold extra), HDMI port, 4 RJ45 Gigabit Ethernet Ports, 4 USB 3.0 ports, Kensington lock and a reset button.

The entire enclosure sits on six round rubber feet.

In terms of storage for this review we equipped the XN8008T with 8 Seagate IronWolf 12TB SATA III HDDs and a single Kingston 480GB SSD.

For our tests we also used two X540-AT2 cards (10GbE) and the GC-ALPINE-RIDGE V2.0 TB3 card by GIGABYTE (plugged into our new test rig - GIGABYTE X299 AORUS GAMING 9 / INTEL CORE I9-7980XE / CORSAIR MP510 960GB / CRUCIAL BALLISTIX ELITE 64GB DDR4-3200).

Although we performed most of our tests with an AKITIO TB3 cable (40Gbps) QSAN also provided us with their very own later on (also 40Gbps - sold extra).