Conclusions and Costs
Most (all?) of what I said for the TS-219P would apply to the TS-410.
- Excellent build quality
- Adequate horsepower
- Good looking to a guy!
- Quiet with subdued lighting
- A nice array of external expansion ports
- Lack of port multiplier abilities on the eSATA ports. As a side note, QNAP indicated that “As you mentioned about the port multiplier ability on eSATA, this is already on our road map and we will provide this by firmware upgrade in the near future.”
- Software-wise, there is excellent feature set to be had.
- A nice GUI overlaying the Linux OS underneath
- UPnP compliant but not quite DLNA compliant.
- Driver support is good, but needs improvement. This is not exactly as much a QNAP problem, I assume, as it is a device manufacturer problem.
In the end, I like it! This is what I envision:
- My WHS machine being my file server and client auto-backup server.
- Using a script/batch file on the WHS, automatically backing up the WHS shares to an NAS device like the TS-410.
- An on-line cloud storage service to back up certain files. Pictures, home videos, and other important irreplaceable documents. No need to backup ripped CD’s or DVD’s. Those are replaceable.
- A combination of media servers and/or WMC extenders serving various areas of the home playing music, Internet radio, streaming movies, and so on.
Dang! This is starting to get expensive, but quite cool! One thing I have discovered over the past year or so, however, is that as one discovers the world of data backup the resultant paranoia on loss scenarios goes hand-in-hand.
One can never have too many backups! And I am just (!) now discovering the world of streaming all this media throughout the home.
The cost (no drives):
$449
£266.40 excl Vat (majentaonline.co.uk)
This sounds expensive and perhaps it is. But it is quite interesting to read one particular comment on an Engadget TS-410 announcement:
This has been a very long debate, and one I read ALL the time on every forum.
Yes, you can build a homesystem using WHS, and yes you are likely to get features not found on these devices, but imo, NAS’s are a great simple solution.They are great at what they do because they’re simple, efficient, they dont require frequent windows updates each week, you dont have to worry about updating drivers etc
I have a … which did cost an arm and a leg, but its well worth it imo.
Its exactly the same debate, as to why buy a popcorn hour PC, when you can build a HTPC for the same sort of money?I’ve been there and done that!
In my home AV setup, I want simplicity, not windows updates, regular crashes and constant driver updates.
I removed the product reference simply because I wanted the statement to be more NAS generic. Regardless, I could not have said the above better myself. It simply comes down to what your needs and goals are.
