QNAP TS-209 II Turbo NAS

Conclusions and Experiences

There are lots of things that makes the TS-209 II attractive, but under the veil of features lies a middle-of-the-road piece of hardware.

The only thing that makes the TS-209 II worth buying over the original TS-209 is the extra 128MB of memory, while not forgetting that both of are non-upgradable where others (the Thecus N2100 for example) are, the extra memory only makes a difference if you're really using all the features - you've got to be downloading, torrenting, running a server or handling FTP traffic, but even then the CPU will likely be the bottleneck of performance.

Even with a single user (myself) reading and writing from the drive the CPU usage was constantly at 100 percent even with just a single disk and struggled to exceed 15MB/s - half that of USB 2.0's maximum theoretical bandwidth. QNAP may have the software features sewn up, but it needs to work on optimising the core (network) engine to improve overall performance.

What it comes down to is whether you're buying a network drive for simple storage needs or all its features in a very low power device? If you want those features - running all those extra services will probably upsell you into spending the extra £25 on the TS-209 II over the cheaper TS-209. That is, if you're not too concerned with performance.

The lack of RAID expansion makes this no better than any other two disk NAS we've tried and negates some of the advantage of buying this over a cheaper pre-built unit with 2TB already installed: Western Digital My World 2TB, LaCie or Buffalo NAS options start hitting the £300 mark with a pair of 1TB hard drives already included worth around £160 of that. There's some advantage in this where you only need to send one thing back if it ever goes wrong, but not if you run a RAID 1 array and all you need to return is a single drive while keeping the rest of your data on the other.


Without expansion potential with data retention, this might upsell you further to a four disk TS-409 should you want some breathing room, the problem is with this argument is that you need a pair of disks as a minimum for RAID expansion or migration anyway, so you're still buying two drives regardless. The only other option for expansion from a single drive upwards is a Drobo and its network adapter, but that's far more limited in its application (storage only, no extra features) unlike the QNAP NAS boxes.

Other options include the ZyXEL NSA-220 which does include a HomePlug option so you can stick it anywhere around the house out of the way, rather than within arms reach of your router/switch. Sadly though, it looks like some 1950s washing machine and that's not a good thing. The next best thing, then, is the Thecus N2100 which will save you at least £50. Having owned a Thecus N2100 though, all I can say is that I wish I'd paid £50 more and got a TS-209 - it's more difficult to install the hard drives, they run hotter, it's noisier and the plastic casing is cheap and nasty compared to the seemingly luxuriously sleek QNAP enclosure.

I'm not just bitter because apparently turning off the N2100 using the the on/off button, of all things, can irreversibly corrupt the firmware, destroying my data, it's simply because the QNAP TS-209 is a better product with a web interface that's light years ahead. It does have some quirks that did lose our data but it's not unreasonable considering the abuse I've given it in the last few days - pulling hard drives in and out like some magical chair game: at least it's still working.

So yes, the QNAP TS-209 II is sub-par in terms of performance and in some respects doesn't do what we expect of it, but in others it's the one of the better products out there. Ultimately, if you get one it should work perfectly fine but just be aware of its limitations. We can't stress enough to only get one if you will actually use its features, otherwise either keep an eye out for something simpler and cheaper, or build it yourself because a basic RAID array is effortless and FreeNAS accompanied by some old hardware costs a fraction of this, although admittedly finding something of this size and with its generally good looks isn't easy.

• Performance
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• -
• -
• -
• -
• 6/10

• Features
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• -
• 9/10

• Value
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• -
• -
• -
• 7/10

• Overall
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• -
• -
• -
• 7/10

What do these scores mean?