Hardware Components
Moving back (or on) to the hardware side, let me first say this. The build quality of the case is top notch. The drive caddies are among the best ones I have had the opportunity to use. Smooth sliding, positive positioning, and positive latch action. There is plenty of external ports available for expansion. 3 USB ports and 2 eSATA ports. The downside on the eSATA ports is that they are not port multiplier aware. One drive to one eSATA port.
The TS-219P is very quiet. I can hear the harddrives occasionally, but that may be attributed to the particular drive in use.
When the device goes to sleep, it has a tendency to take time to reawaken. I do not believe that this would a problem under normal use, but remember, I am an American. Americans demand instant gratification, so take what I say about delays with massive grains of salt…
The CPU will not win any speed contests, but Linux is not a demanding OS. Take away certain CPU-intensive tasks like transcoding, and you find that it will do the job. The same goes for the memory footprint, 512 MB’s sounds bad, but is quite adequate for the application.
Conclusions and Costs
Being that WeGotServed is slanted toward covering Windows Home Server, the obvious thing to do is to compare the TS-219P to a Windows Home Server machine. I hesitate to do simply because it would fall under the same non-comparison would could be made by comparing a WHS to one of Microsoft’s business server OS’s. Different feature sets, different audiences, lots of similarities also. For example, a WHS does not natively support RAID as it uses the DE technology. A NAS is designed around the use of RAID technology. Does that make a NAS better because it uses an established method of data redundancy? A WHS can do a bare-metal restore of a machine. A NAS can do the same thing (if I understand correctly) with the appropriate 3rd party software, like Acronis.
But I wish to look at the TS-219P, and other NAS devices, as a NAS device. So enough of that.
Hardware-wise, I find the QNAP TS-219P to have excellent build quality. Horsepower-wise, it is adequate for what it is intended to do. With a very small carbon footprint. Personally, I like the look of the QNAP device, which I would consider having a slight industrial look. Perhaps not great WAF when compared to other devices, but I like it! It is quiet and the LED’s are not going to blind a person.
Finally, it has a nice array of external drive capacity ports, however, there was no port multiplier abilities on the eSATA ports
Software-wise, there is excellent feature set to be had. Sometimes, it appears much simpler than a corresponding Microsoft feature, and sometimes just the opposite. I would contribute some of that to the fact that I am not a Linux guru, but perhaps not. Mostly, it is simply different. I did not find the built-in help system very helpful. About as helpful as reading through a BIOS section of motherboard manual. However, the manual and forum resources made up for the lack of a useful help system.
I did find the web-based User Interface quite appealing and easy to navigate. And it does support Windows, Mac, and Linux OS’s.
Media-wise, I consider the TS-219P a mixed bag. Without the ability to perform transcoding, UPnP it may be, DLNA it is not. Translation: it does not support all audio formats. I did copy a movie from my WHS over to the TS-219P. Ripped to the VOB format, it played beautifully on either system using Windows Media Player. I did not try other formats. If WMC can play it, life was good.
The TS-219P is a storage device that is trying to add a new feature set: a multimedia feature set.
Driver-wise, I consider support for external devices to vary. This may not be as much a QNAP problem as it may be a Linux problem, in general. I really need to delve into this area much more than I was able for this review. Knowing which flavor of Linux the TS-219P runs on might help; please refer to the HP driver page earlier in this article.
The cost?
$399 (Newegg)
£300.11 (Amazon.co.uk)
Considering that you can get an Acer H340 WHS for the same price, which includes a 1TB HD, it comes down to what feature set you are looking for and/or what you are most familiar with (Windows or Linux).
