NAS shoot-out: QNAP TS-659 Pro II Turbo NAS

MyCloudNAS is very easy to set up. Sign up on the QNAP website, provide a unique name for your server, and a wizard walks you through the process of choosing the NAS services to publish, whether they're public or private, and which users are allowed to access which service. If you have a UPnP router, the wizard will take care of the port forwarding. If you're a little more paranoid or security conscious (sometimes they go hand in hand) you can set up a QCloud Access Code that users must have in addition to their user account on the NAS. Purists might point out that this is nothing more than dynamic DNS and port forwarding, and I'd agree with them. The beauty of MyCloudNAS is that a user with little networking knowledge can set it up easily and quickly.

QNAP TS-659 Pro II Turbo NAS: Performance
QNAP shined in my performance tests. It was the top performer in almost every category of my testing. The Thecus performed better on several of the tests but never by much. What surprised me was the perceived speed. As I ran through my various tests of NFS, AFP, SMB/CIFS, iSCSI, rsync, and Time Machine backups, I began to get a feel for what was quick and what wasn't. The QNAP always seemed as fast as the performance numbers showed. I know that sounds very subjective (and it is), but anyone who has spent a lot of time with networking and file server hardware will know what I'm talking about.

For the results of my performance tests, see the mainbar, "NAS shoot-out: 5 storage servers battle for business." For the reviews of the competing products, follow these links: Iomega StorCenter px6-300d | Netgear ReadyNAS Pro 6 | Synology DiskStation DS1511+ | Thecus N5200XXX.

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