In total there are five new models in the new TS-x69L Turbo NAS series covering 2,4,5,6 and 8-bay versions. All are powered by the dual-core Intel Atom processor and almost every model features a 2.13GHz processor while the smallest 2-bay version is fitted with a slightly slower 1.86GHz processor.

Pricing starts at around $500 for the TS-269L (2-bay model) and goes as high as $1000 for the TS-869L (8-bay model). In between that we have the TS-469L for $750, the TS-569L for $840 and the TS-669L for $930.

Armed with the QNAP v3.7 firmware which we have looked at previously on the TS-419 II Turbo NAS, the new TS-x69L Turbo NAS series has a lot to offer in terms of features. There are a number of important business applications allowing this new series to fulfill the needs of SMB users.

Features such as iSCSI support which can provide a seamless IP-SAN solution for server virtualization with support for VMware vSphere, Citrix XenServer and Microsoft Hyper-V are ideal for business use. Being certified with VMware Ready for ESXi 5, the TS-x69L series supports both vSphere 4 and vSphere 5. In addition, the TS-x69L series also supports Virtual Local Area Network (VLAN), which can be used to create different network segments for different devices to communicate with each other regardless of their physical location.

As important as these features are for business users, performance is just as important and this is why the TS-x69L series boast some pretty impressive hardware specifications. That said Atom powered NAS devices are nothing new, so we are interested to see how the new TS-x69L series stacks up against existing products.

The TS-269L model measures just 150 (H) x 102 (W) x 216 (D) mm and weighs 1.74kg, which is fairly typical for a 2-bay NAS. The TS-869L on the other hand measures 185.2 (H) x 298.2 (W) x 235.4 (D) mm making it roughly five times the volume and therefore it isn’t that surprising to find that it weighs roughly 4x more at 7.1kgs.

Although both models are themed in a similar manor they are quite different in appearance. Despite the fact that they are both black and feature an aluminum chassis, the design is quite different. The TS-269L follows a more minimalistic approach featuring a single USB 2.0 port on the front along with a quick-copy button and a power button.

The TS-869L on the other hand features a large panel above the drive bays and QNAP has used this area in the past to house their Touch-N-Go PC-less Installation feature. While this is a handy feature I never really found myself having to rely on it as configuring the NAS remotely is far quicker and easier.

Therefore we were not overly disappointed to learn that the Touch-N-Go PC-less Installation feature has been removed from the TS-x69L series. However the panel remains on the 4,5,6 and 8-bay models as this is where the internal power supply is located. The 2-bay TS-269L relies on an external power brick and this is why it is able to use a more compact design.

Like all good NAS devices, the TS-x69L series all allow drives to be hot-swapped during operation. The use of individual, detachable 3.5-inch hard drive trays makes adding or removing storage capacity a breeze. Interestingly however the drive bays cannot be locked for better security, though there is an anti-theft K-Lock Security Slot at the rear which can be used to prevent the removal of the entire device, though not individual drives.

Moving on, each drive also has its own activity and power light on the front of the case, while status, LAN and USB LED indicators sit on top. The power button for the 4,5,6 and 8-bay models resides on the bottom left and glows blue when active, and there's a USB 2.0 port below it for easy data transfers from portable storage devices.

Around the back the models to vary so let me break it down for you. All five models feature a pair of USB 3.0 ports, dual Gigabit LAN ports, HDMI out and a password and network settings reset switch. Now the 2-bay TS-269L features two additional USB 2.0 ports at the rear along with a single eSATA port. The larger models which includes the 4,5,6 and 8-bay versions get two eSATA ports and four USB 2.0 ports as well as a VGA output.

The TS-269L is cooled via a single 70mm fan while the TS-469L is upgraded to a 90mm fan and the TS-569L a 120mm fan. Then the TS-669L gets a pair of 90mm fans and the biggest model the TS-869L receives a pair of 120mm fans.

Both processors feature a 1MB L2 cache and a GPU frequency of 640MHz, though the latter is not so important for a NAS. They are based on the 32nm Cedarview architecture and support a thermal design power rating of just 10 watts, ideal for NAS purposes. Officially they support single-channel DDR3-800 or 1066MHz memory, though QNAP has gone with slightly faster 1333MHz memory.

It has become relatively common for today's NAS devices to use SO-DIMM slots, especially for higher-end models. The new TS-x69L series features not one but rather two SO-DIMM slots (including the TS-269L) making it possible for users to expand memory support from 1GB to 3GB without voiding their warranty.

The PCB is also donning a pair of Intel WG82574L single-port Gigabit Ethernet controllers which supports features such as teaming (Link Aggregation).

The USB 3.0 is provided by an EtronTech host controller, the TS-269L uses the EJ168A which offers two ports while the larger 4,5,6 and 8-bay devices use the EJ188H.

In the case of the larger TS-869L a separate PCB houses four Marvell 88SE9125 SATA 6Gb/s controllers which uses the PCI Express interface to provide bandwidth for two SATA ports that support JBOD, RAID 0, 1, 5, 6, 10, 5 + hot spare. Also found on this PCB is the PLX PEX 8603 3-lane, 3-Port PCI Express Gen 2 (5.0 GT/s) switch.

The TS-269L on the other hand takes a far more simplistic approach as it uses the Intel 82801JR I/O Controller Hub 10 (ICH10) which supports half a dozen SATA 3Gb/s ports, though only two of them are in use in the TS-269L while a third is used to provide the eSATA support.

The HDMI output found at the rear of all five models is supported by the Asmedia ASM1442.

QNAP has gone with a 100% solid capacitor design, which is said to improve the TS-x69L’s durability. While we don't doubt that's true to some extent, it's always difficult to quantify such claims.

This wouldn't be much of a NAS without storage and the TS-x69L’s compatibility list includes many Hitachi, Maxtor, Samsung, Seagate and Western Digital hard drives. Early adopters will be happy to know that 4TB drives from Hitachi are supported using the latest firmware.

Just about everything can be customized in some way. The main menu includes sections titled System Administrator, Disk Management, Access Right Management, Network Services, Applications, Backup, External Device and System Status -- not to mention that most of these contain several sub-menus.

Under System Administrator, we first entered the "General Settings" sub-menu where the server name and port can be configured, as well as time, date and language settings. The "Network" sub-menu follows with TCP/IP settings along with a few status options such as link speed and activity.

The "Hardware" sub-menu allows you to define various fan control options via the Smart Fan feature, in addition to letting you tweak the hard disk standby mode and the minimum free space limit before disabling the light signal alert. You can also enable or disable the alarm buzzer for error reporting.

By default, the security settings are set to low, but you can easily change this to medium or high in the appropriate section if you believe it's necessary for your needs. You can also specifically define which IP addresses or networks are permitted or barred from accessing the device's contents.

"Disk Management" contains a "Volume Management" sub-menu that allows you to setup various volumes using a number of different configurations. For example, it's possible to set just two of your four drives in RAID0 while placing the others in RAID1, 5, 6 or even a non-RAID configuration.

The "Networking Services" menu includes options for Microsoft and Apple networking as well as NFS and FTP services. There are Telnet/SSH, SNMP, Web Service and Network Service Discovery options too.

The TS-419P II also includes applications such as the Web File Manager, Multimedia Station, Download Station, Surveillance Station, iTunes Service, UPnP Media Server, MySQL Server and QPKG Plug-ins.

With these you can set up an image slide show, stream music encoded in the most popular formats, and perform PC-less BitTorrent, FTP, or HTTP downloads. There's even a remote control application, dubbed QGet, to remotely manage these downloads from any Windows or Mac computer. Realize that we're only scratching the surface here, as you'll find settings for nearly anything you can imagine.

With your storage in place, you'll want to run the Quick Setup Wizard to install the firmware (supplied on a CD or downloaded from QNAP's site), followed by a six-step setup process.

The first step requires you to assign a server name -- we went with QNAP. Next, you must create an administrator password using any combination of characters (there are no restraints on how complex the password must be). Step three requests the date, time and zone of the server, then you'll have to select DHCP or manually configure the IP settings for the network.

The fifth step allows you to manually select what services you want to use. Here you'll find a number of FTP, Multimedia and Web Server features that can be enabled or disabled depending on preference. Features such as Apple networking, for example, can be disabled if you have no intention of using it.

The last step lets you choose the disk configuration -- we had single disk, JBOD, RAID 0, RAID 5 and RAID 6 as possible options. At the end of the process, you'll get an overview of your chosen settings.

We installed Western Digital Red 3TB hard drives into the TS-269L and TS-869L. The WD Red 3TB drives cost roughly $210 each and are designed for 24/7 use in a NAS device. The Red series is also available in 1TB ($100) and 2TB ($160).

Although the configuration process began quite fast, enabling the network services and initializing the four hard drives took some time, we estimate close to 20 minutes. Once all that is done, you need to connect to the TS-269L or TS-869L using a web browser, gaining access to the Administration area.

The 2TB version of the Red drives costs $160 whereas the enterprise RE4 drives, which are also designed for 24/7 operation, costs $230 for the same capacity making the new Red series roughly 30% cheaper. So how do they compare in terms of performance? Read on to find out…

The Western Digital Red was 20% faster than the RE4 when measuring single drive performance in our large single file copy test. However it was interesting to discover that once place in a RAID0 configuration using two drives the Western Digital Red drives were now 7% slower than the RE4’s.

This time when using our game copy test we see that a single Western Digital Red drive is 5% slower than the RE4. Once placed in a RAID0 configuration using two drives the Red drives become 15% slower than the RE4’s.

The Western Digital Red and RE4 drives both delivered a throughput of 115MB/s in our program copy test when measuring single drive performance. However once placed in a RAID0 configuration the Red drives were 6% slower than the RE4’s.

Interestingly despite being slower in the majority of our real-world copying tests the Western Digital Red drives were found to deliver stronger read performance in the AS SSD Benchmark when compared to the RE4 series.

Again we find that that the Western Digital Red series is superior to the RE4’s in the AS SSD Benchmark, this time when measuring sequential write performance.

The AS SSD Benchmark access time read results are surprising, here we see that the access time of the Western Digital Red series is roughly twice that of the RE4’s.

Whereas the Western Digital RE4 drives have a fast 1 – 2ms write access time the Red series is more like 13ms and 7ms when in RAID.

- Western Digital Red 3TB (Serial ATAII) - Western Digital Red 3TB (Serial ATAII) - Western Digital Red 3TB (Serial ATAII) - Western Digital Red 3TB (Serial ATAII) - Western Digital Red 3TB (Serial ATAII)

- Western Digital Red 3TB (Serial ATAII) - Western Digital Red 3TB (Serial ATAII)

- Western Digital RE4 500GB (Serial ATAII) - Western Digital RE4 500GB (Serial ATAII) - Western Digital RE4 500GB (Serial ATAII) - Western Digital RE4 500GB (Serial ATAII) - Western Digital RE4 500GB (Serial ATAII)

- Western Digital Blue 500GB (Serial ATAII) - Western Digital Blue 500GB (Serial ATAII)

- Western Digital Blue 500GB (Serial ATAII) - Western Digital Blue 500GB (Serial ATAII)

- Western Digital Blue 500GB (Serial ATAII)

- Western Digital Blue 500GB (Serial ATAII) - Western Digital Blue 500GB (Serial ATAII)

- Western Digital RE4 500GB (Serial ATAII) - Western Digital RE4 500GB (Serial ATAII) - Western Digital RE4 500GB (Serial ATAII) - Western Digital RE4 500GB (Serial ATAII)

- Western Digital RE4 500GB (Serial ATAII) - Western Digital RE4 500GB (Serial ATAII) - Western Digital RE4 500GB (Serial ATAII) - Western Digital RE4 500GB (Serial ATAII)

- Western Digital RE4 500GB (Serial ATAII) - Western Digital RE4 500GB (Serial ATAII) - Western Digital RE4 500GB (Serial ATAII) - Western Digital RE4 500GB (Serial ATAII) - Western Digital RE4 500GB (Serial ATAII)

- Western Digital RE4 500GB (Serial ATAII) - Western Digital RE4 500GB (Serial ATAII) - Western Digital RE4 500GB (Serial ATAII)

Without question one of the most important aspects of any NAS device is performance and unfortunately the QNAP TS-869L and TS-269L arrived at a time when we were changing a few crucial aspects of our NAS testing. Firstly we are moving away from testing with RAID0 as this is not how these devices will be configured in the real-world.

Testing with RAID0 has been our preferred method in the past as it shows maximum performance. That said, most readers are more interested in seeing RAID5 performance and therefore we are moving away from RAID0 to RAID5.

Along with the move to RAID5 we are now also testing with different hard drives. The new Western Digital Red hard drive series are perfect for testing NAS devices as they are designed to be used in such devices. The problem here is that under certain conditions the performance difference between the previously used RE4 and the new Red series is quite large, making it difficult to compare our new data against the old.

So with the QNAP TS-869L being tested using RAID5 with the WD Red drives it is not fair to compare its performance to say the Synology DS412+. Rather the DS412+ has been included as a rough guide. The good news is that in the coming weeks we will update our results with a number of new NAS products using RAID5 and the WD Red hard drives.

The power consumption of the QNAP TS-269L was higher than expected using up to 29 watts when under load. This is considerably more than other 2-bay NAS devices that we have tested, such as the Synology DS212+ which consumed just 20 watts. The QNAP TS-869L on the other hand consumed 57 watts of power which is similar to the TS-659 Pro II and roughly just 10 watts more than the Synology DS412+.

Despite being fitted with just two hard drives the QNAP TS-269L was much faster when using RAID0 compared to the TS-869L using RAID5. With a throughput of 106.7MB/s the TS-269L was as fast as any NAS device that we have tested. However using RAID1, which is a more likely configuration for this NAS device, saw the TS-269L’s performance dip down to 95.4MB/s.

The QNAP TS-869L on the other hand, which we only tested using RAID5, was slightly faster than the RAID1 configuration of the TS-269L sustaining a transfer speed of 97.3MB/s.

Here the QNAP TS-269L using RAID0 with just two drives was only slower than the Synology DS412+ and Thecus N7700PRO with a throughput of 65.9MB/s. However when configured using RAID1 the TS-269L was much slower, dropping down to just 49.6MB/s making it slightly faster than the Thecus N3200XXX.

The QNAP TS-869L on the other hand managed 58.9MB/s making it slightly slower than the single bay QNAP TS-119P II.

Neither of the new QNAP TS-x69L models faired all that well in our program download test. The TS-269L using RAID0 maxed out at just 20.1MB/s, though this was the same performance that we saw from the TS-659 Pro II which also uses a dual-core Intel Atom processor. When configured using RAID1 the TS-269L was even slower sustaining a transfer speed of just 12.9MB/s.

The QNAP TS-869L using RAID5 was able to achieve a throughput of 17.6MB/s which is roughly the same performance seen from the Thecus N3200XXX.

When uploading a single large file to the QNAP TS-269L when configured using RAID0 we saw a bandwidth of 106.4MB/s, which is similar performance to other high-end NAS devices tested. However when using RAID1 the bandwidth was reduced to just 63.4MB/s which meant that the TS-269L delivered similar performance to the Synology DS212+, while it was slightly slower than the TS-219P II.

Again the RAID0 configuration of the QNAP TS-269L performed well sustaining a throughput of 82.5MB/s, making it only slightly slower than the TS-659 Pro II. Still when using RAID1 the throughput was reduced to just 71.6MB/s. Meanwhile the RAID5 configured TS-869L achieved a throughput of 75.1MB/s.

The program upload test saw both the QNAP TS-269L and TS-869L provide strong performance. The TS-869L came second only to the Synology DS412+, though this devices was configured using RAID0 with Western Digital’s Black series of hard drives.

Measuring on-disk copy performance with our single large file test saw the RAID0 configured QNAP TS-269L deliver a throughput of 52.7MB/s, while this was reduced to just 28.9MB/s when using RAID1. The TS-869L on the other hand managed 43.5MB/s which was roughly the same performance seen from the TS-119P II.

The game copy test also saw the RAID0 configured QNAP TS-269L deliver similar performance to the Synology DS412+. Meanwhile the RAID1 configuration was roughly 10MB/s slower dropping to just 24.7MB/s. The QNAP TS-869L sat somewhere in the middle with 30.4MB/s when configured using RAID5.

Finally the program copy test and here we see that the new QNAP TS-x69L series struggles. The TS-269L managed 14MB/s when using RAID0 making it slightly slower than the Synology DS212+ and slightly faster than the TS-119P II. The TS-869L which was using RAID5 managed 11.7MB/s allowing it to match the Synology DS212j.

The CrystalDiskMark sequential read/write test saw the QNAP TS-269L using RAID0 slightly outclass the RAID5 configured TS-869L. The read performance of the new TS-x69L models was comparable to the Synology DS412+ and even the older TS-659 Pro II. The write performance wasn’t bad either and had the TS-869L been tested using RAID0 we believe it would have been able to match the TS-659 Pro II.

The random 512K performance again saw the new QNAP TS-x69L models deliver similar read performance to what we have seen in the past from other high-end NAS devices. However this time the write performance was quite weak with the RAID0 configured TS-269L managing just 35.5MB/s.

The last CrystalDiskMark test we are going to look at is the random 4K-QD32 test. Here the TS-869L (RAID5) and TS-269L (RAID1) both delivered virtually the same performance, while the RAID0 configured TS-269L provided roughly twice as much write bandwidth.

The QNAP TS-269L maxed out at 112.3MBs when using RAID0 and 97.5MB/s with RAID1. The TS-869L on the other hand hit 93.8MBs when using RAID5, while the Synology DS412+ reached 114.5MB/s using RAID0.

The QNAP TS-269L maxed out a 112.6MB/s when using RAID1 and 117.9MB/s when using RAID0. The QNAP TS-869L on the other hand reached 109.6MBs.

That being said, it is hard to gauge exactly where the new QNAP TS-269L and TS-869L stand in terms of performance. However because we did also include some RAID0 testing with the TS-269L we can draw some conclusions here, though again it was using the new WD Red hard drives.

When compared to the QNAP TS-219P II the TS-269L performed well. Depending on the test the TS-269L could be found delivering much more performance. For example in our download test the TS-269L was much faster for the single large file and game tests, while it was slower in the program test. That said when measuring upload performance the TS-269L was far superior.

Therefore we believe the new TS-x69L series is capable to matching and even beating the performance of competing products.

At this stage we believe the TS-269L is retailing for $500, though availability seems scarce at the moment. This is the same price as Synology’s DS712+ that we reviewed last year which is driven by an Intel Atom D425 "Pineview" (45nm) single-core processor, so on paper the TS-269L should be faster.

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Then at the opposite end of the spectrum we have the QNAP TS-869L which costs a cool $1000, twice that of the 2-bay model. This is the same price as the slightly smaller 6-bay TS-659 Pro II which features a slower Atom 1.8GHz processor. When compared to the competition the Synology DS1812+ can be had for roughly the same price and supports 8 drives along with the same Atom 2.13GHz processor.

QNAP seems to have the market well covered with its new high-end 2,4,5,6 and 8-bay TS-x69L series. These new NAS devices look great, perform well and are packed with features such as dual Gigabit LAN, eSATA and of course USB 3.0. Those looking for a high performance NAS device that supports anywhere from 2 drives up to 8 should certainly have the new QNAP TS-x69L series in mind.