QNAP TS-219P review

We were really impressed with the last QNap NAS we saw.

The TS-439 Pro was quiet, could take four SATA disks and had lots of useful features, but it cost over £500. We were therefore pleased to see the new TS-219P, a two-disk version that costs around half as much.

Up to two 3½in SATA hard disks can be fitted inside the TS-219P, giving a maximum capacity of 4TB. You can use 2½in laptop disks instead without the need for adaptors. The disks are screwed into sliding trays, which makes it easy to swap them out in the event of a disk failure. They can also be locked in place to deter casual thieves. You can choose between RAID 0, which gives you the full capacity of your disks, or RAID 1, which provides data protection against a disk failure at the cost of half your storage capacity.

The TS-219P is one of the faster NAS devices we've seen, but it's quicker at reading files than it is at writing them. When configured as RAID 0, it wrote large files at 24.5MB/s and read them at 41.3MB/s. Small files were written at 23MB/s and read at 34MB/s. In RAID 1 configuration, it was around 5MB/s slower in all our tests.

Configuring the TS-219P is painless thanks to the simple discovery utility and the logical web configuration interface, which looks uncannily like the one used on Synology's devices. It's also a little cluttered, though, due to the multitude of options. However, creating multiple user accounts, organising them into groups and setting their access permissions to different folders is quick and easy. There are three USB ports for making one-touch backups from USB storage devices or to make use of the built-in print server.

A NAS device works best when left on constantly so users on your network can access their files whenever they want, but this also wastes power. The extensive power management settings allow you to schedule when the TS-219P turns itself on and off. Unlike some other NAS devices, you can even schedule multiple settings for each day.

We had no trouble using the TS-219P as an iTunes music server or as an UPnP media server. Files can be downloaded from FTP, HTTP or BitTorrent site without a PC. The download controls are separate from other settings so users on your network can download files without the possibility of them altering any crucial settings. Other features, such as a blogging server, are available as plug-ins.

QNap's TS-219P is easy to set up, quick at copying files and packed full of useful features. It's not cheap and some other NAS devices are a bit faster, but overall this is the best two-disk NAS enclosure we've seen.

Author: Alan Lu