Network storage is becoming more and more popular with the home user. As their data needs change, so does they way in which they store their data. More and more, I see each individual family member has their own PC and rather than just share a folder on one of the PCs, it makes sense to have a low power device on the network for storage. However, a NAS can be quite a challenge for some to set up as they were initially build for businesses. The QNAP TAS-268 aims to help change that with the help of Google's Android operating system. Unlike other NAS units that we have reviewed from QNAP, the packaging is decorative. Typically a QNAP NAS comes in a plain cardboard box with a small sticker detailing the model number but, since this NAS is aimed at home users specifically, QNAP chose to use a line art drawing of the NAS. The box also features specifications and features on the front and rear of the unit. Inside, the QNAP TAS-268 is further protected from damage as it is encased in a rigid foam insert. There is a plastic cover that is attached to the NAS to protect the finish from scratches and scuffs. Included in the box is a quick installation guide, a power supply and cord, an Ethernet cable and hard drive keepers. Specifications CPU ARM® 1.1 GHz dual-core processor Memory 2GB DDR3 Flash Memory 4GB Hard Disk Drive 2 x 3.5" SATA 3Gb/s NOTE: For the HDD compatibility, please visit https://www.qnap.com/compatibility RAID Management RAID 0, RAID 1, JBOD, Single disk LAN Port 1 x Gigabit RJ-45 Ethernet port LED Indicators HDD 1-2, LAN, Status, USB USB 1 x USB 3.0 (Front) 4 x USB 2.0 (Rear) Buttons Power/Status, Reset, USB One-Touch-Backup Alarm Buzzer System warning Form Factor Mini-tower Dimensions (H x W x D) 187.7 x 90 x 125 mm 7.36 x 3.54 x 4.92 inch Weight Net: 0.7 Kg (1.54lbs) Gross: 1.88 Kg (4.14lbs) Sound Level* Sound pressure (LpAm): 17.0 dB(A) Temperature & Humidity 0-40℃,5-95% RH non-condensing Power Consumption (HDD Standby) HDD standby:6.05W In operation:13.24W (with 2 x 2TB HDDs intalled) Power Supply External Power Adapter, 60W, 100-240V Fan Yes 1. LED Indicators: LAN, HDD, Status, USB 7. Password & Network Settings Reset Button 2. Power Button 8. USB 2.0 port x 4 3. SD Card Reader 9. HDMI portx 1 4. USB One-touch-copy Button 10. Gigabit LAN port x 1 5. USB 3.0 port x 1 11. DC 12V Power Connector 6. Exhaust for heat dissipation Specifications provided by QNAP. Specifications are subject to change without notice. For more information visit the TAS-268 product page at www.qnap.com A Closer Look At The QNAP TAS-268 NAS The QNAP TAS-268 doesn't really look like a NAS at all. There are no visible hard drive bays. Honestly, to me it looks like a small form-factor or a novelty PC. The design hides the fact that it is a storage device very well. The NAS is just slightly taller than a 3.5" hard drive and measures in at 7.36" (H) x 3.54" (W) x 4.92" (D). The front of the TAS-268 features a LAN, HDD, Status, and USB LED indicators, a power button, SD card reader, a One-touch-copy button, and a single USB 3.0 port. Ventilation exhaust is at the bottom of the NAS. On the back of the QNAP TAS-268 is the I/O and includes 4 USB 2.0 ports, HDMI port, Gigabit RJ45 LAN port, and the 12v DC power connector. In order to open the NAS, you will need to lay it on its side and remove the screw on the bottom of the NAS. After the screw is removed, slide the larger cover up to access the internals. With the cover removed, you get a good idea how the drives will sit inside. The drives sit in the vertical position. The QNAP TAS-268 is designed to be tool-less as long as you're using 3.5" hard drives. Installation of the drives is quite simple. Simply slide the drives into place with the SATA and power connectors facing down and use the included retainers to lock the drives in place. After the drives are installed, simply slide the cover back in place and secure using the previously removed screw. Internally, 2 gigabytes of DDR3 is provided by ProMOS V73CAg04808RAJJ11 . Ram is 800 MHz @ CL 11-11-11. 4 GB of flash is provided by SKhynic e-nand. USB 2.0 and 3.0 are handled by the ASMedia ASM1074L and ASM1153E respectively. A The ASMedia ASM1153E also handles SATA on the daughter card. The chip is capable of SATA 1.5, 3.0, and 6.0 speeds. QNAP QTS 4.2 User Interface One of the nice things about QNAP is their user interface is the same across all of their product lines. The QTS interface, in my opinion is simple to use and easy to navigate. There are a lot of options in the interface and I will only be covering a basic set. The Smart Start configuration wizard is not mandatory and can be skipped and you can go directly to the user interface of the TAS-268. When you first launch the UI, you will be presented with a log in screen. The default username and password is admin/admin. After logging in, you will be taken to the desktop. The desktop is very similar to a Windows or Linux based interface. Icons can be placed on the desktop as shortcuts to the applications and configuration items you most commonly use. Menus, notifications and performance information are available on the top bar of the screen. If you are like me, you’ll want to know what the hardware on the TAS-268 is doing. How hot is the CPU, what’s the fan speed, network bandwidth information is all available by clicking on the gauge icon at the top right of the screen. Each of the areas can be placed on the desktop by simply clicking and dragging the title of the box such as hardware. If you were to drag the hardware section onto the desktop, you’d see the graphical representation that you see in this menu but only for that section. The same applies to system health, resource monitoring, hdd health, and storage. Background tasks is the icon that looks like papers in an inbox on the top bar. Backup status is the circular icon with a hard drive in the middle, and the error and information logs is the icon with the lower case “i” in the center. The menu is the three horizontal bars located at the upper left of the interface. Click on this brings down the menu with all the areas needed to manage the NAS. The control panel is the first item on the list. The control panel is where you will manage all the available configuration settings on the NAS. It is broken down in to four major groups: System Settings, Privilege Settings, Network Services and Applications. The System Settings sub-menu is where you can configure items such as network IP addressing, system security, backups, power management, and firmware updates. The storage manager application can also be launched from this menu. Granting users permissions to shared folder, or adding them to groups is done in the Privilege Settings sub-menu. You can also set disk quotas for the users in this area too. For those users that have a Windows Active Directory domain, you can add the NAS to the domain. This allows you to assign domain accounts vs local NAS accounts permissions to the shared folders on the NAS. The TAS-268 can act as a domain controller in addition to being added to your Windows Domain. The networking services sub-menu allows you to configure the services that will run on the network. You can enable Windows, MAC, and Linux networking shares. FTP, Telnet/SSH, SNMP and network discovery and enabled and configured here as well. Typically on a shared folder on the network, when a file is deleted, it is gone. It is not stored in the recycle bin on a Windows PC or server. The network recycle bin on the TAS-268 stores deleted items for shared folders when it is enabled. This functions the same way that your recycle bin does on your PC and, just like your PC it will have to be emptied occasionally as it takes up space. The applications sub-menu is where you will manage the applications that are already installed on the NAS. You cannot install additional applications from this location. By default there are a few applications that come with the TAS-268 and others are installed during the initial configuration, depending on the options you choose. Going back to the menu, you’ll see the App Center option. This is where you can install and update applications from QNAP’s “app store”. There are a lot of applications that are free however, some require to you purchase additional licenses to enable or expand on certain features. A manual install option is available for those linux guru’s that want to install applications that are not available from QNAP. myQNAPcloud allows you to grant access to the NAS from any where in the world. There is an option to automatically provision certain routers. Once the configuration has been completed, you’ll need to establish a connection to CloudLink. There are options to set up Dynamic DNS so that your users do not have to try and remember an IP address but just remember a URL such as http://mycloud.modders-inc.com. On top of the NAS is a serial number that will grant access to the myQNAPcloud service. Finally, we will tackle the Storage manager menu. Storage manager is where you can monitor and configure items related to the installed hard drives, configured volumes, and the RAID array. The overview page gives you a very quick glance at the storage system. It will let you know if you have any failed disks, volumes or storage pools. Utilization will show how much space each of the shared folders is using. The disks menu will give you more detailed information on each of the physical hard drives installed in the NAS. You can also run SMART tests on each disk to verify their health as well as monitoring temperatures on each disk. The information provided here can be used to determine if your drives are in danger of failing. The storage space menu is where all the RAID and volume configuration is done. There are a lot of options here and you can tweak and tune as much as you’d like. From here you can create a storage pool. Think of a storage pools as a container for your physical hard drives. A pool can only have one RAID type but you can have multiple storage pools. For example, storage pool 2 may contain disks 1 & 2 and is a RAID 0 array and storage pool 2 contains disk 3 & 4 and is a RAID 1 array with disk 5 as a hot spare. This gives you two storage pools with two types of RAID arrays. Thick and Thin volumes be created in storage pools. However, the TS251+ only supports RAID types 1 & 0. A single Static volume will allocate 100% of the available space for the selected drives. It can be a little confusing determining which type of volume you’d like to use. QNAP’s help is an outstanding resource. There's a secondary user interface. This NAS can be connected to a HDMI monitor or TV with HDMI inputs. Android is used as the interface. Below you will see a 4 minute video of the interface. One annoyance is that you must log in similarly to logging into the web interface before you will be able to use the Android interface. Luckily included with the NAS is a wireless mini keyboard and touchpad. Here's the video Testing Methodology Testing Methodology System Configuration Case Cooler Master Cosmos II SE CPU Intel i7 4770K Motherboard MSI Z97m Gaming Ram 2 GB G.Skill F3-12800CL9q DDR3-1600 GPU MSI GTX 970 OC Hard Drives Samsung 840 EVO 256gb SSD Western Digital black 500 gb 7200 RPM HDD Power Supply NXZT Hale v2 1000 Watt power supply 4 Seagate 4 TB 7200 RPM desktop drives were installed and used in the NAS tests. A dual port Intel network card was installed in the test system. The QNAP TS-563 in all RAID arrays used a Single Static Volume. In our testing I used the Thecus N5550, QNAP TS-451, & the Seagate DP-6 to get comparison numbers against the QNAP TS-563. The QNAP TS-563 shipped with 8 gb of RAM. The Seagate DP-6 used 4 drives and 2 GB of RAM. The other NAS devices use 4 GB of ram and the same Seagate NAS hard drives. Network Layout For all tests the NAS was configured to use the a single network interface. One CAT 6 cable was connected to the Cisco 2960 from the NAS and one CAT 6 cable was connected to the workstation from the switch. Testing was done on the PC with only 1 network card active; the Killer network card and the corresponding software were disabled for the testing. The switch was cleared of any configuration and left in a unconfigured state. Jumbo frames was not enabled and no changes to the network interfaces was made. Software All testing is done based off of a single client accessing the NAS. We are currently working on a multi-client testing solution. Stay tuned. To test NAS Performance I used The Intel NAS Performance toolkit and Atto Storage benchmark. The Intel NAS Performance toolkit simulates various tasks for storage devices such as video streaming, copying files and folders to and from the NAS as well as creatingcontent directly on the NAS. To limit caching, a 2GB G.Skill memory module was used in all tests. All options in the Performance toolkit were left that the defaults. The NAS performance test is free to download. You can pick up a copy for yourself here. All tests were run a total of three times then averaged to get the final result. RAID 0, RAID 10, and RAID 5 are all tested. Tests were run after all the RAID arrays were fully synchronized. For real world testing, I copied a 4.3 gigabyte ISO file from the SSD in the test PC to the shared folder on the NAS. 4.3 gigabytes of MP3 files were copied over as well. RAID Information Images courtesy of Wikipedia JOBD or Just a Bunch Of Disks is exactly what the name describes. The hard drives have no actual raid functionality and are spanned at random data is written at random. RAID 0 is a stripe set and data is written across the disks evenly. The advantage of RAID 0 is speed and increased capacity. With RAID 0 there is no redundancy and data loss is very possible. RAID 1 is a mirrored set and data is mirrored from one drive to another. The advantage of RAID 1 is data redundancy as each piece of data is written to both disks. The disadvantage of RAID 1 is write speed is decreased as compared to RAID 0 due to the write operation is performed on both disks. RAID 1 capacity is that of the smallest disk. RAID 10 combines the 1st two raid levels and is a mirror of a stripe set. This allows for better speed of a RAID 0 array but the data integrity of a RAID 1 array. RAID 5 is a stripe set with parity. RAID 5 requires at least 3 disks. Data is striped across each disk, and each disk has a parity block. RAID 5 allows the loss of one drive without losing data. The advantage to RAID 5 is read speeds increase as the number of drives increase but the disadvantage is write speeds are slower as the number of drives is increased. There is overhead with RAID 5 as the parity bit needs to be calculated and with software RAID 5 there is more of a performance hit. RAID 6 expands on RAID 5 by adding an additional parity block to the array that is distributed across all the disks. Since there are two parity blocks in the array more overhead is used with a RAID 6 array. For a full breakdown of RAID levels, take a look at the Wikipedia article here. RAID configurations are a highly debated topic. RAID has been around for a very long time. Hard drives have changed, but the technology behind RAID really hasn’t. So what may have been considered ideal a few years ago may not be ideal today. If you are solely relying on multiple hard drives as a safety measure to prevent data loss, you are in for a disaster. Ideally you will use a mutli-drive array for an increase in speed and lower access times and have a backup of your data elsewhere. I have seen arrays with hot spares that had multiple drives fail and the data was gone. Do yourself a favor and read up on the different types of RAID arrays and plan accordingly. Personally, I use a RAID 10 array with an automated backup to the cloud. I feel with that setup, I’ve done what I can to keep my data safe. Conclusion and Final Thoughts While the QNAP TAS-268 is not the fastest NAS we've tested, it is none the less functional. If you consider the NAS has only 2 GB of ram and cannot be upgraded and a dual core 1.1 GHz CPU, the NAS does pretty well. But speed isn't everything. A combination of ease of use, functionality, and performance are the requirements that will get most homeowners to purchase a device such as this. From an ease of use standpoint, let's start with the installation of the hard drives. QNAP makes it very simple to install the hard drives in the TAS-268 and as long as you're using 3.5" drives, the installation does not require any tools. The hard drives slide into their spots and is held in place by a set of keepers for each drive. Set up is done well with the help of a wizard once the user logs into the device for the 1st time. The wizard does a good job of explaining what each setting is and what it does. Within about 5 minutes and after answering a few questions, you can have the NAS up and running. The QTS interface is easy to use and simple to navigate. If a user gets hung up on a setting, the help file is quite good at explaining the settings as well as giving external links to deeper explanations of the settings. If you choose to use the device solely as a network storage device, the functions can stop there. But with the inclusion of USB and a HDMI port, the NAS can be used as a media center, light weight PC for web browsing or for playing games compatible with Android. I like the fact that the HDMI based user interface is Android based. I have used Android on my phones and tablets and I am pretty familiar with it. From my testing, all of my Android apps ran flawlessly on the QNAP TAS-268. Streaming from Netflix was flawless. One thing that you will need to do is set the resolution to match your TV or monitor. By default, the Android OS displays movies in 1280x720 but does support 1920x1080 and 4K as well. Performance is on par with that I expected from the NAS based on the CPU and memory. This NAS is designed to be a lightweight storage unit. While it's not too far behind the others in the Intel tests, the larger files were around 30MB/s and the MP3 copy averaged around 10 MB/s. The QNAP TAS-268 is compatible with other QNAP software including software that ships your data to an online cloud provider. Just because it has RAID don't assume your data is completely safe. RAID offers minor protection. At less than $250.00, the QNAP TAS-268 would be a great addition to any small network that needs shared storage. A pair of 4 TB hard drives can be purchased for about $120 each. For less than $500 you can put 8 TB of network storage on your network. The combination of performance, features and price net the QNAP TAS-268 the Modders-Inc MUST HAVE Award. If you're looking for simple storage and a simple media player, the QNAP TAS-268 NAS may just fit for you.