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Building on the success of the QNAP TS-x69 series is the new TS-x79 range, which features two new models. Leading the charge for QNAP are the TS-879 Pro and TS-1079 Pro high-end small and medium business desktop NAS solutions. These new eight and ten bay models are powered by an Intel Core i3 processor and support 10GbE networking for maximum performance...
The TS-879 Pro model that we are focusing on today comes with up to 30TB of online storage, which QNAP says is designed to fulfill the massive storage needs of the high-end SMB environments. Furthermore when coupled with eight 4TB hard drives the TS-879 Pro can provide up to 32TB of high-speed storage.
Helping to make that data readily available to numerous simultaneous users is the 10GbE networking support, which allows for a throughput of over 1GB/s. Also helping to achieve these speeds is a powerful dual-core Sandy Bridge processor with Hyper-Threading. On paper the TS-879 Pro has the makings of the ultimate NAS device, so we are keen to see how it performs under real world conditions. QNAP doesn’t offer read and write performance claims, so we have no idea what to expect when using eight enterprise hard drives. What we do know is that the TS-879 Pro costs a cool $2200 without any hard drives or 10GbE network card. The slightly larger TS-1079 is fetching $2600 and the only difference here is the extra two drive bays, other than that the units are virtually identical. Those wanting to utilize the 10GbE support will have to fork out at least $200 per 10GbE network card and will require at least two, unless connecting the TS-879 directly to a 10GbE capable switch. With 10GbE networking still extremely costly many smaller businesses will likely stick with Gigabit Ethernet and for those users QNAP has provided a pair of ports for the option of Link Aggregation.
There are plenty more standard features as well, such as SATA 6Gb/s support on all ports, eSATA, as well as USB 3.0 access at the front and rear. The TS-879 Pro also supports RAID 0, 1, 10, 5, 6, 5+ hot spare, 6+ hot spare, 10+ hot spare, single disk, JBOD, and the new Global Hot Spare feature that allows a spare drive to flexibly replace a failed drive on any RAID volume on the NAS for automatic RAID data rebuilding. The tower measures 217.5(H) x 327(W) x 321.2(D) mm and tips the scales at 8.39kg, though when loaded with hard drives is considerably heavier than that. With eight drives installed QNAP says the TS-879 Pro generates just 27.4dB when operating and will consume 101 watts. With that said let’s move on to check out the internal workings of the TS-879 Pro... |
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ProX |
Posted on: 05/02/2012 11:59 PM
Amazing performance from this thing considering its just using standard SATA hard drives. We need to upgrade our NAS at work so I will be pushing for one of these  |
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satana |
Posted on: 05/03/2012 11:12 PM
they are expensive but to build a pc that can do everything this can and be as reliable is difficult. what is killing them right now for small business use is the over inflated hard drive prices! |
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randomuser |
Posted on: 05/04/2012 11:17 AM
pretty incredible performance from a bunch of hard drives |
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Billy Ray Valentine. |
Posted on: 05/06/2012 10:39 PM
Steve, do you still have the eval unit? Can you put two 8 gig dimms in it and see what that does for performance? P.S. You'll have to enable caching in the system menu. |
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optimus |
Posted on: 05/06/2012 11:17 PM
I have the older model and it doesn't support 8GB modules  I'm not sure what the TS-879 Pro supports but I was interested in seeing how it goes with more memory. 2GB isn't very much and it sucks that you cannot upgrade without axing the warranty. Anyway thanks for the review even though it just made me want to upgrade. |
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oZziE |
Posted on: 05/07/2012 02:03 AM
Very interesting stuff. I have been wanting to know how these perform using 10 Gigabit network and now I have my answer so thanks. |
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TS-1079 Pro Owner. |
Posted on: 07/10/2012 05:54 AM
RAID 0 is useless as no one in their right mind would use it in production, but the numbers sure do look snazzy. I own the TS-1079 Pro. It was purchased to meet some rather extreme I/O demands on a low budget. An intel x520-DA2 is in use on the box and Dell 10GbE switches (8024Fs) are in use for the storage network. Intel x520-DA2s are in use on the NICs on the physical machines using the disks. NFS is in use on the 1079. All 9 disk bays were populated with 240GB SSDs in a RAID 5 configuration with the 10th bay being a 240GB SSD as a hot spare. Somehow your test #s blow my TS-1079 out of the water. Using ATTO, my Reads peak in excess of 600MBps and my writes never exceed 80MBps. Using CrystalDiskMark 3.0.1x64, my #s are as follows: Seq: 488.3 / 31.31 MBps 512k: 422.4 / 27.22 MBps 4kQD32: 108.0 / 100.6 MBps No idea what gives here, but my write performance is absolutely horrible. Any guidance on this would be appreciated. We ended up building another physical box running Nexenta at a fraction of the cost of the QNAP and it runs circles around the QNAP in terms of performance, which is very disappointing. Since you were able to squeeze way more juice out of your 879 in RAID 5, I'd love to know what you think might be causing the performance hits on my writes. |
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TS-1079 Pro Owner. |
Posted on: 07/10/2012 06:09 AM
Forgot to add: Running Firmware 3.6.1 Build 0302T My 2x 10GbE NICs are trunked using the Broadcast mode. Jumbo Frames are enabled on the TS-1079 Pro and on the switches. Write cache is disabled (as QNAP requests in the manual). No power save options are enabled. *And the Nexenta box is running on the same exact switches with the same switch port configurations so the switches are not at fault. |
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TS-1079 Pro Owner. |
Posted on: 08/02/2012 02:26 AM
I couldn't be more disgruntled. I got in touch with QNAP support, who was thankfully very responsive although very unhelpful. Support Experience: I was told to pull all network connectivity from the QNAP and connect it directly to a single machine. It transferred data at 80MBps and this was deemed a win. The technician then informed me that at this point he is confident the box is 100% functioning as intended and he was done supporting me. It was then declared a network issue which they refused to troubleshoot. This is hilarious because I've got a Synology NAS and a massive Nexenta machine on the same network operating flawlessly and generating massive performance while this thing creeps along and incessantly drops from all the hosts under prolonged heavy I/O. I am using supported disks on QNAP's HCL and because it works with a single connection over 1GbE, not 10Gbe, it's deemed a success. To say I am disappointed is an understatement. I was not offered the opportunity to escalate the ticket and this is the last of my business that QNAP will be seeing. QNAP's recent press release: This on the heels of their press release stating that their x79 and x69 models are officially supported for vSphere 4 and 5 to include acting as replication targets for SRM. See the press release here: http://www.qnap.com/en/index.php?lang=en&sn=845&c=1962&sc=&n=12785 I take grave exception with this as I can't get the TS-1079 Pro to function without dropping off of my host since the latest firmware update which caused a production outage last night. I intend to revert the firmware to the previous version which was stable (which means rebuilding the entire array) which takes almost an entire day+ for a RAID 5 array with 8x 2TB disks. Save yourself a lot of money. Build a physical machine with 8 or 10 bays and run some free shared NAS appliance on it that doesn't tank with VMware. You can load it with RAM and 10GbE NICs and never have to contend with the headaches I have faced repeatedly at the hands of this TS-1079 Pro. |