QNAP TS-419P+ Turbo NAS 4-Bay Network Storage Review

QNAP TS-419P+ Installing the drives

The next step is to install the drives. Each drive is held in a tray, supporting both 2.5 inch and 3.5 inch drives, to which the drive is screwed into. To remove the drive tray, you simply lift the latch up and the drive trays slide out easily.

Having already started this project with a different Disk Array case, I already had four Western Digital WD20EARS 5400RPM 64MB 2TB Hard Drives. Before choosing a NAS device, prospective buyers should also go to the manufactures site and verify that the drives they wish to use are on the company’s supported drive list. To see the list of drives supported by QNAP go to their website.

I decided on a RAID 5 configuration for the hard drives, giving me the ability to have one drive failure, and a usable array size of almost 6TB. The QNAP TS-419P+ also supports RAID 0, 1, 5, 6, and JBOD.

QNAP has the ability to support RAID Expansions as well. If a user installs smaller hard drives, and wishes to upgrade the hard drives to a large size, the QNAP TS-419P+ supports on the fly migration, meaning the user does not have to copy the data off the array before installing the new drives. Currently the largest disks that QNAP supports are 2TB hard drives, but with the growing popularity of 3TB Drives, I could see a firmware upgrade coming in the future to allow the NAS to support the large hard drives.

Lets move on to configuring the device!