First Looks
The TS-439U is in the standard 1U “pizza box” format. It has a black bezel with the QNAP logo at the top left corner. I’d like to see a QNAP logo on the top of the unit so that it could be easily identified from the top inside a rack.
Each hard drive is locked in with a round key and easily pops out for maintenance. There’s a USB port on the front meant for the USB quick backup feature, which uses a button the front to copy everything from a mass storage device onto the NAS. It’s useful for daily backups of that Flash drive one takes everywhere and has a high chance of losing.
The side has some stubs on it used to mount the rackmounting hardware. It comes with sliding rails, a very useful feature for datacenters with lots of servers in a rack.
The dual, redundant power supplies are on the rear. Notice that there are in fact two power supplies, but only one power port. This is a potential hamper on the redundancy of the power supplies, but it’s likely a design compromise because there simply isn’t any more space available on the back of the unit. The other two USB ports, as well as the dual gigabit Ethernet interfaces and a VGA port for diagnostics, are on the back.
Control Panel
Less than a year ago, QNAP overhauled its notoriously difficult-to-use and ugly control panel interface. The TS-439U series of course has the new control panel, and it’s a dream to use compared to the old one. It’s slick and flashy. It’s a little onerous sometimes, but most of the time, it’s exactly what you need.
For screenshots of the control panel, see the Usage section of our TS-809 Pro review. The control panel hasn’t changed much since that review in July.
Some benchmarks
I conducted some simple benchmarks using Mac OS X on my MacBook Pro with a 2.53 GHz processor and 4 GB of DDR3 RAM. All disk transfers were done from a ramdisk on the Mac in order to negate the typically slow bottleneck of a 5400 RPM laptop drive. I used an approximately 317 MB file for the tests. The data was transferred via gigabit Ethernet through a Dell gigabit switch.
I used version 3.1.2 of the QNAP firmware, but a release in the 3.2 series should be available by press time. Version 3.2.0 was released 7 December, but pulled when a serious problem was found with internationalization. The hard drives inside the unit are WD 750 GB 7200 RPM drives, model number WD7501AALS.
SMB
7.184 seconds write = 353 Mbps
5.947 seconds read = 426 Mbps
AFP
4.253 second write = 596 Mbps
.809 seconds read = 3134 Mbps
With this consistent read time of less than a second, I decided to try copying it to the hard drive since it appears that OSX caches AFP transfers. 7.336 seconds or 345 Mbps read to the hard drive.
NFS
6.531 second write = 388 Mbps
3.635 seconds read = 698 Mbps
This is one fast unit! It’s important to consider the speed of the hard drives, too. The drives which QNAP supplied for testing are high-quality, high-speed drives. N.b.: Your own results will vary based on the drives you use.
The unit draws approximately 120 W at boot, 75 W at idle, and up to the full 150 W at load. I took these measurements using a P3 Kill-a-Watt.
