Usage & Testing
I installed four 1 TB Western Digital Red SATA III hard drives into the TS-469L. They went in effortlessly, but I kinda wish that there was a way to do this without having to screw them in. One thing I wish QNAP would pick up from other NAS vendors is screws with rubber vibration reduction rings.
I made a little movie of the initialization process, primarily as a guide for the wary. It’s really easy.
The new QTS 4.0.1 is what I installed, and I’m really impressed with the new layout for the control panel. Rather than an old frame or list paradigm like previous revisions, QTS 4 opts for a desktop-like feel. Competitor Synology went this way a few years ago, and I’ve long praised Synology for that decision. I’m glad to see QNAP giving it a try, and eager to see how it matures in future revisions of the firmware.
I used the device for some file transfers and poked around with some of the advanced features. We’ll have some articles in the coming weeks highlighting those features individually! For now, though, here’s a walkthrough of the control panel. Grab a big cup of coffee or a beer, and press play:
Benchmarking
No review is complete without some kind of benchmarking, but NASes are hard to benchmark because the drives can make a significant difference! So, keeping in mind that the drives are very new 1 TB drives from WD (model WD10EFRX-68JCSN001.0), here are the benchmark results:
| Test | Speeds (in MBps) |
| TS-469L SMB | 58.1/46.1 |
| TS-469L AFP | 96/81.6 |
| TS-469L NFS | 97.2/95.3 |
| TS-809 Pro NFS | 106.3/46.4 |
All benchmarks were conducted using Blackmagic Disk Speed Test on my 2012 13” MacBook Air connected via Thunderbolt Ethernet to a Dell gigabit switch. The TS-469L’s Ethernet adapters were in standalone mode. I included a test of NFS benchmark from TS-809 for comparison. I attribute the considerably faster write speed to significantly faster drives and slightly more powerful CPU (2.4 GHz C2D vs 2.13 GHz dual-core ATOM).
