Manufacturer: QNAP Price: $ 430/$500 US Author: Steven Walton Date: 08/05/2013

[ Introduction ]

Today we are checking out the latest 4-bay NAS products from QNAP, which includes the TS-421 and TS-420. Powered by the Marvell Kirkwood System-on-Chip they are designed to offer a more affordable alternative to the Atom powered TS-469L which we reviewed late last year, so it will be interesting to see how they compare... QNAP already has a fairly extensive 4-bay NAS line up, which includes the TS-412 ($360), TS-419P II ($480), TS-469L ($650) and TS-469 Pro ($820). So where does the TS-420 and TS-421 fit in? Well the cheaper of the two, the TS-420 costs $430 while the TS-421 costs $500. This puts the TS-421 alongside the TS-419P II in terms of pricing, which is interesting as they both feature a Marvell 2.0GHz processor while the newer TS-421 features twice as much DDR3 memory. Meanwhile the TS-420 sits between the TS-419P II and TS-412 in terms of pricing, which isn’t surprising given it’s hardware specifications are somewhere in-between the two. Moving away from the in-house competition we have Synology, with the DS413 ($520) and DS413j ($380), both matching up with the TS-421 and TS-420. Given that we will be featuring all four products in this review it will be interesting to see how they compare. Before we move on to check these new NAS products out in greater detail we should also mention that this review coincides with the release of the QTS 4.0, which QNAP describes as their most app-centric QTS (QNAP Turbo System) yet and here is a direct quote from their general manager, Meiji Chang. “The launch of QTS 4.0 alongside the Turbo NAS TS-x20 and x21 series was a tremendous success, and we have received many positive responses from our users. Now more users can experience the easy-to-operate yet feature-rich QTS 4.0 that makes storing and managing home digital data easier, and enjoy the stored multimedia contents with more fun." Some of the new and improved features include multi-window operations, Qsync for file synchronization, smart mobile applications and integrated multimedia entertainment. All these features and more will be examined in greater detail later in the review, for now let’s take a closer look at the TS-421 and TS-420.

Table of Contents >>> Introduction <<< QNAP TS-421 & TS-420 Design QNAP TS-421 & TS-420 Hardware QNAP Turbo System 4.0 Web Based Installation QNAP Qfinder 4.0.2 Installation Test System & Power Consumption Benchmarks: File Download Performance Benchmarks: File Upload Performance Benchmarks: File Copy Performance Benchmarks: CrystalDiskMark 3.0 Benchmarks: Atto Disk Benchmark Conclusion Next Page ->

sock	Posted on: 08/07/2013 10:04 PM Wow shame about the upload performance. Did you try with an ssd to see what happened?

Steven Walton Posts: 104 Joined: 2010-02-08

Posted on: 08/07/2013 11:00 PM We have tried an SSD, it improved the write (upload) performance by almost 20MB/s in our upload large file test. That's not bad but the trouble is no one uses SSD's in NAS servers. We have thought about doing some SSD testing but the problem is some NAS use 6GB/s SATA and others use 3GB/s, for hard drives this makes next to no difference but for SSD's it makes a huge difference. I supposed we could test with a high-speed 3GB/s SSD but I don't really see the point, as I said no one is going to use SSD's in a NAS. I believe the issue with the TS-421 is firmware related.

TonyS

Posted on: 10/07/2013 08:22 PM Any update on the write performance, which seems quite out of kilter with the rest of the results?

Rapid

Posted on: 10/29/2013 02:32 AM Thanks for the review I now own the TS-421, seemed better value than the TS-420.