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...

With the lid removed the user will be faced with an FSP Group FSP350-710UJ 350w power supply and a single PCI Express x8 slot which provides support for a 10GbE network card. For testing we installed an Intel Ethernet Server Adapter X520-DA2 into this slot and in order to do so it requires the removal of the standard bracket as QNAP has provided their own custom bracket design to fit the TS-879 Pro.

Moving past the PCI Express slot and power supply, we stripped the TS-879 Pro down to its critical components. There are two large blue PCB’s within the TS-879 Pro, the first is the motherboard while the second is the hot-swappable SATA module which of course features eight ports.

Also featured on the SATA module is a Xilinx Spartan XC3S50A chip, as well as four Marvell 88SE9125-NAA2 controllers. The Spartan XC3S50A chip is a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) designed by Xilinx, who invented the FPGA, and is the biggest name in the FPGA world to this day. The Spartan-3A family is a very low cost, high-performance logic solution for high-volume, cost-conscious applications.

The Marvell 88SE9125-NAA2 controllers each support two SATA 6Gb/s ports which are backwards compatible with the SATA 3Gb/s and 1.5Gb/s standards. They each require a single PCI Express x1 interface and offer hardware RAID support.

Moving on to the primary PCB, which we are calling the motherboard, there is much more to see here. The most prominent component is the large passive heatsink which is designed to cool the Intel Core i3-2120 processor. This is a 32nm Sandy Bridge processor featuring two cores with four threads thanks to Hyper-Threading support. It operates at 3.3GHz, features a 3MB L3 cache, the HD 2000 graphics engine and has a TDP rating of 65 watts.

Given that this processor is installed into a standard LGA1155 socket, in theory it would be possible to upgrade this processor, though doing so will void the warranty. Opposite the processor are a pair of DDR3 DIMM slots populated with a pair of ADATA SU3U1333B1G9-B (DDR3-1333) 1GB memory modules for a total system capacity of 2GB. Again it would be possible to upgrade these memory modules, but doing so would void the warranty.

Also found on this PCB is an NEC D720200F1 controller which provides a pair of USB 3.0 ports. The front panel connector plugs into a USB 3.0 port onboard using an extension lead. Next to the USB 3.0 controller is a small expansion PCB board which features a single memory module and this is where the QNAP software is installed.

There are also a pair of Intel Gigabit Ethernet controllers which includes the WG82579LM and WG82574L. The WG82579LM is a PHY chip which connects directly to the chipset, while the WG82574L is a standalone network controller that uses the PCI Express interface.

Around at the I/O panel we have a pair of eSATA ports which presumably connect to the chipset, four USB 2.0 ports which also connect to the chipset and a USB 3.0 port. There are also two Gigabit Ethernet connections along with a VGA and HDMI output. The display outputs are reserved for system maintenance.

The new RADIUS server provides RAIDUS-client-enabled devices with centralized account management and authentication for network access. External drive encryption blocks unauthorized access and protects data on external drives from theft by encrypting a disk volume or a specific partition.

Another new feature integrates Windows Live Messenger to send the administrator instant notifications. The administrator is able to receive the current system temperature, disk and volume information by typing inquiry commands on the Windows Live Messenger program.

After installing and configuring the TS-879 Pro (which we will dissect shortly), you can connect to the administration interface using your favorite web browser to access a host of options seen below.

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 TS-879 Pro 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-879 Pro 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.

The first time setup is made extremely easy thanks to the Touch-N-Go PC-less Installation. Using DHCP the TS-879 Pro automatically configures itself to the network. Using the LCD the user can then create RAID configurations using the available disks, they can also choose whether to encrypt the volume.

Additionally the network setup can also be customized using the LCD panel, the administrator password can be set and a number of vital system statistics can be monitored. The LCD panel can also be used to notify the user of any issues, such as system overheat or network lost.

Using the QNAP Finder software the user can also configure much of the TS-879 Pro in a Windows environment.

The first step requires you to assign the TS-879 Pro a server name -- we went with QNAP. Next, you must set the date, time and zone of the server. The third step is to create an administrator password using any combination of characters (there are no restraints on how complex the password must be).

The user can then go on to enable/disable filename encoding followed by the network settings menu. The network settings menu allows the user to configure each network interface individually or combine them using trunking. For testing we used trunked Ethernet ports one and two using the IEEE 802.3ad mode, otherwise known as Link Aggregation.

If you didn’t create a volume using the Touch-N-Go PC-less Installation, or wish to change the volume, the user must log into the NAS management software. Under disk management it is possible to remove/create volumes and for testing we used all six drives to create a RAID0 configuration and then a RAID6 configuration.

- Western Digital Black 1TB (Serial ATAII) - Western Digital Black 1TB (Serial ATAII) - Western Digital Black 1TB (Serial ATAII) - Western Digital Black 1TB (Serial ATAII) - Western Digital Black 1TB (Serial ATAII) - Western Digital Black 1TB (Serial ATAII) - Western Digital Black 1TB (Serial ATAII) - Western Digital Black 1TB (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 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 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 Blue 500GB (Serial ATAII) - Western Digital Blue 500GB (Serial ATAII) - Western Digital Blue 500GB (Serial ATAII)

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

The only real draw back to making a powerful NAS device other than perhaps the price is power consumption. The QNAP TS-879 Pro sucks down power like a high-end desktop computer, using 146 watts under load and 119 watts at idle. When compared to the Synology DS2411+ the TS-879 Pro consumes more than twice as much power.

The single large file test saw the TS-879 Pro limited to 111.2MB/s when using the Gigabit Ethernet connection, which is similar to the performance seen from the Synology DS1511+ and TS-659 Pro II.

Yet when using the 10GbE connection with RAID0 the TS-879 went from 111.2MB/s to a blistering fast 643.6MB/s, which is a 478% increase or roughly five and a half times more performance. It is also worth noting that the RAID0 configuration was 24% faster than RAID5 in this test.

The program copy test is made up of many small non-compressed files. Here we see when using a single Gigabit Ethernet connection the QNAP TS-879 Pro was still quite fast, providing a throughput of 90.4MB/s making it slightly faster than the Synology DS1511+ and DS1512+. However when using the 10GbE interface the bandwidth sky rocketed to 441.3MB/s, which was a 388% increase or nearly five times the performance. Again RAID0 was faster than RAID5, providing about 17% more performance.

The game copy evaluation is comprised of a mixture of small and large files. Here we found that when using the 10GbE network interface the QNAP TS-879 Pro provided the same 191MB/s when using RAID0 and RAID5. This made them 234% faster than the Gigabit configuration or a little over three times faster.

When copying the 6GB file on-disk the QNAP TS-879 Pro armed with its 10GbE network and RAID0 configuration achieved 283.4MB/s, making it 282% faster than the Gigabit Ethernet configuration. Here the RAID0 configuration was also 10% faster than RAID5. Meanwhile the TS-879 Pro achieved 74.2MB/s when using a single Gigabit connection making it slightly faster than the DS1512+.

The program copy test is made up of many small non-compressed files. Here the RAID0 configuration using the 10GbE connection averaged 164.4MB/s, making it 27% faster than the RAID5 configuration. Moreover it was 257% faster than the TS-879 Pro using a Gigabit connection as it provided three and a half times more performance.

The game copy evaluation is comprised of a mixture of small and large files. Here the QNAP TS-879 Pro was limited to just 51.2MB/s despite featuring eight hard drives in RAID0 using a 10GbE connection. Still the RAID0 configuration was 20% faster than RAID5 and 183% faster than the Gigabit Ethernet configuration.

CrystalDiskMark reveals some pretty impressive sequential read and write performance. The 675MB/s for the write test is comparable to the 643MB/s we received in our 6GB ISO file upload test. That said, the 420MB/s for the read test is considerably better than the 126MB/s we received in our 6GB ISO file download test.

The random 512K performance was interesting as the QNAP TS-879 Pro produced roughly 429MB/s for both the read and write tests when using RAID0. Meanwhile the RAID5 performance was very different, as the read performance maxed out at 303MB/s and the write performance just 154MB/s.

Finally the random 4K-QD32 test and here the QNAP TS-879 Pro when using 10GbE network along with RAID0 achieved a read throughput of 249.6MB/s with a write throughput of 82.1MB/s. In comparison the write performance of the RAID5 configuration was significantly slower whereas the read performance was slightly faster. The write performance of the RAID5 configuration was so weak that the TS-879 Pro using the Gigabit Ethernet connection with RAID0 was faster.

The Atto Disk Benchmark reveals that the QNAP TS-879 Pro using RAID0 and 10GbE network delivers similar performance when working with small 1K data when compared to other high-end NAS devices. However as the data size increases the TS-879 Pro starts to run away, and by the time we hit 128K it was many times faster than devices using the Gigabit Ethernet interface. That said, when using RAID5 the TS-879 Pro was significantly slower when compared to the RAID0 configuration.

The QNAP TS-879 Pro again performed extremely well when using RAID0 with the 10GbE network configuration, almost reaching 700MB/s. The RAID5 configuration also performed quite well despite being much slower than RAID0.

This was evident when running the CrystalDiskMark synthetic benchmark, which saw sequential write performance go from 114MB/s to a blistering fast 675MB/s. The read performance was just as impressive going from 80MB/s to a much speedier 420MB/s. Then the Atto Disk Benchmark revealed a maximum read speed of 606MB/s with a write speed of 693MB/s, and that’s faster than the latest SSDs.

That said, as the TS-879 Pro is being driven by hard drives smaller file writes do slow things down and this was found when testing with our game and program copy tests. Still, when compared to the Gigabit performance we found that 10GbE provided massive gains.

Of course 10GbE networking isn’t cheap and at best users can expect to pay at least $200 per card, taking the $2200 price tag of the TS-879 Pro to $2400 if you wish to include 10GbE support. Then there is the cost of more than half a dozen hard drives and we suspect users are going to want to go with 3TB or 4TB drives, which can potentially cost more than the device itself given today’s hard drive prices.

Pricing aside, the only other disadvantage is the power consumption, which is much higher than previously reviewed NAS devices. Still, when you factor in the performance increase the higher power consumption is easy to justify, so for most users we feel this is a non-issue

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The TS-879 Pro seems to cover all the bases very well. The inclusion of USB 3.0 is important, as is the 6Gb/s SATA support along with eSATA. Furthermore the latest installment of the QNAP NAS management software is excellent, providing a huge array of features while remaining simple and easy enough to use for even the most novice users.

For users wanting extreme throughput from a somewhat small NAS device the QNAP TS-879 Pro is certainly worth checking out. The device is easy to setup and configure, largely due to the unique front panel controls, while the web browser user management software is well refined. Overall we have no problem recommending the QNAP TS-879 Pro as it is an amazing product.