QNAP TS-853 Pro 8-bay Intel Bay Trail SMB NAS Review
by Ganesh T S on December 29, 2014 7:30 AM ESTMiscellaneous Aspects and Final Words
In order to keep testing consistent across all 8-bay units, we performed all our expansion / rebuild testing as well as power consumption evaluation with the unit configured in RAID-5. The disks used for benchmarking (Western Digital WD4000FYYZ) were also used in this section. The table below presents the average power consumption of the unit as well as time taken for various RAID-related activities.
| QNAP TS-853 Pro RAID Expansion and Rebuild / Power Consumption | ||
| Activity | Duration (HH:MM:SS) | Avg. Power (W) |
| Single Disk Init | 00:02:51 | 30.34 W |
| JBOD to RAID-1 Migration | 08:32:42 | 39.72 W |
| RAID-1 (2D) to RAID-5 (3D) Migration | 23:07:23 | 50.41 W |
| RAID-5 (3D) to RAID-5 (4D) Expansion | 01:00:29 | 59.69 W |
| RAID-5 (4D) to RAID-5 (5D) Expansion | 01:50:43 | 71.01 W |
| RAID-5 (5D) to RAID-5 (6D) Expansion | 01:57:20 | 81.57 W |
| RAID-5 (6D) to RAID-5 (7D) Expansion | 02:08:18 | 91.9 W |
| RAID-5 (7D) to RAID-5 (8D) Expansion | 01:59:59 | 101.88 W |
| RAID-5 (8D) Rebuild | 10:56:15 | 101.62 W |
The graphs below show the power consumption and rebuild duration when repairing a RAID-5 volume for the various 8-bay NAS units that have been evaluated before.
QNAP's RAID rebuild times have consistently been great (even with the bitmap feature turned off). We see that the duration is beat only by Asustor's AS7008T. However, power consumption is quite a bit lower for the TS-853 Pro. In fact, the TS-853 Pro is the most power efficient of the lot when it comes to RAID-5 rebuild.
Concluding Remarks
Coming to the business end of the review, we are in a good position to discuss the merits of various 8-bay solutions for the mid-range SMB market. The main tussle is between the Synology DS1815+ and the QNAP TS-853 Pro. When it comes to home and power users / low-end SMBs, the TS-853 Pro can be easily recommended. The real-time transcoding and media serving capabilities as well as the QNAP suite of mobile apps get the job done without much ado. Virtualization Station is an awesome differentiating feature - something that the competition is yet to match. Applications for VMs are numerous - home automation controllers, casual software development machines - the list goes on. We also tested out system migration by moving disks from our TS-451 sample under long term testing to the TS-853 Pro, and the new system was up and running with all data / user details intact immediately.
However, when it comes to the actual target market - mid-range SMBs, it looks like the TS-853 Pro has missed the mark with the current version of QTS. One of the most glaring shortcomings is the absence of the Storage Pool feature - something available in the higher end units such as the TS-EC1279U-RP. The other aspect is the limited iSCSI LUN configuration capabilities. Synology really hits a home run with their iSCSI feature set. Fortunately, QNAP indicated that both of these aspects are being addressed in QTS 4.2, slated to go public in the next few months.
The final verdict is that if you are a home / SOHO user looking for a powerful NAS solution, the TS-853 Pro should be your go-to solution if you can afford a mid-range SMB price. Business users should wait for QTS 4.2 to become public before making a firm decision in favor of the TS-853 Pro. [ UPDATE: QNAP's QTS 4.1.2 update brings block-based LUNs as well as storage pools support to the TS-853 Pro ].
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
58 Comments
View All Comments
ap90033 - Wednesday, December 31, 2014 - link
RAID is not a REPLACEMENT for BACKUP and BACKUP is not a REPLACEMENT for RAID.... RAID 5 can be perfectly fine... Especially if you have it backed up. ;)shodanshok - Wednesday, December 31, 2014 - link
I think you should consider raid10: recovery is much faster (the system "only" need to copy the content of a disk to another) and URE-imposed threat is way lower.Moreover, remember that large RAIDZ arrays have the IOPS of a single disk. While you can use a large ZIL device to transform random writes into sequential ones, the moment you hit the platters the low IOPS performance can bite you.
For reference: https://blogs.oracle.com/roch/entry/when_to_and_no...
shodanshok - Wednesday, December 31, 2014 - link
I agree.The only thing to remember when using large RAIDZ system is that, by design, RAIDZ arrays have the IOPS of a single disk, no matter how much disks you throw at it (throughput will linearly increase, though). For increased IOPS capability, you should construct your ZPOOL from multiple, striped RAIDZ arrays (similar to how RAID50/RAID60 work).
For more information: https://blogs.oracle.com/roch/entry/when_to_and_no...
ap90033 - Friday, January 2, 2015 - link
That is why RAID is not Backup and Backup is not RAID. ;)cjs150 - Wednesday, January 7, 2015 - link
Totally agree. As a home user, Raid 5 on a 4 bay NAS unit is fine, but I have had it fall over twice in 4 yrs, once when a disk failed and a second time when a disk worked loose (probably my fault). Failure was picked up, disk replaced and riad rebuilt. Once you have 5+ discs, Raid 5 is too risky for me.jwcalla - Monday, December 29, 2014 - link
Just doing some research and it's impossible to find out if this has ECC RAM or not, which is usually a good indication that it doesn't. (Which is kind of surprising for the price.)I don't know why they even bother making storage systems w/o ECC RAM. It's like saying, "Hey, let's set up this empty fire extinguisher here in the kitchen... you know... just in case."
Brett Howse - Monday, December 29, 2014 - link
The J1900 doesn't support ECC:http://ark.intel.com/products/78867/Intel-Celeron-...
icrf - Monday, December 29, 2014 - link
I thought the whole "ECC required for a reliable file system" was really only a thing for ZFS, and even then, only barely, with dangers generally over-stated.shodanshok - Wednesday, December 31, 2014 - link
It's not over-stated: any filesystem that proactively scrubs the disk/array (BTRFS and ZFS, at the moment) subsystem _need_ ECC memory.While you can ignore this fact on a client system (where the value of the corrupted data is probably low), on NAS or multi-user storage system ECC is almost mandatory.
This is the very same reason why hardware RAID cards have ECC memory: when they scrubs the disks, any memory-related corruption can wreak havoc on array (and data) integrity.
Regards.
creed3020 - Monday, December 29, 2014 - link
I hope that Synology is working on something similar to the QvM solution here. The day I started my Synology NAS was the day I shutdown my Windows Server. I would, however, still love to have an always on Windows machine for the use cases that my NAS cannot perform or would be onerous to set up and get running.