QNAP TS-451 Bay Trail NAS Performance Review
by Ganesh T S on July 28, 2014 9:00 AM ESTMiscellaneous Aspects and Concluding Remarks
It is expected that most users would configure the QNAP TS-451 in RAID-5 for optimal balance of redundancy and capacity. Hence, we performed all our expansion / rebuild testing as well as power consumption evaluation with the unit configured in RAID-5. The disks used for benchmarking (Western Digital WD4000FYYZ) were also used in this section. The table below presents the average power consumption of the unit as well as time taken for various RAID-related activities.
| QNAP TS-451-4G RAID Expansion and Rebuild / Power Consumption | ||
| Activity | Duration | Avg. Power |
| Single Disk Init (4TB in JBOD) | - | 19.47 W |
| 4 TB JBOD (1D) to 4 TB RAID-1 (2D) | 8h 42m 12s | 31.73 W |
| 4 TB RAID-1 (2D) to 8 TB RAID-5 (3D) | 24h 58m 25s | 42.36 W |
| 8 TB RAID-5 (3D) to 12 TB RAID-5 (4D) | 26h 25m 47s | 52.84 W |
| 12 TB RAID-5 Rebuild (4D) | 9h 14m 48s | 54.37 W |
Similar to the Seagate NAS 4-bay we saw last week, the rebuild process takes much less time compared to the RAID expansion process. The time taken for the various RAID modifications are amongst the lowest of all the four-bay NAS units that we have evaluated so far. Starting with the next review, we will have comparison graphs for these aspects.
QNAP also enables access to the NAS over the Internet through automatic port forwarding (UPnP). There is also a Cloud Link beta service which utilizes relay servers operated by QNAP to achieve the same functionality without the port forwarding setup. Our experience indicated that the beta tag for Cloud Link is not unwarranted. The myQnapCloud.com service also ties in with the Qfile mobile app for access to the NAS contents over the Internet from a mobile device.
The differentiating aspects of the TS-x51 series are obviously the virtualization and transcoding features. In our evaluation so far, the QEMU-based Virtualization Station app works really great for the average consumer (though power users coming off a Hyper-V or VMWare background may miss some features that they take for granted). The hardware transcoding features have not been evaluated in full depth yet, but, in our limited experience, there are still quite a few rough edges - we can't say for sure yet whether it is substantially better than the Intel Evansport-based Synology DS214play. Based on paper specifications, it should definitely be. Hopefully, by the time we get to detailed coverage in a month or two, we can decide one way or the other.
Coming to the business end of the review, we find that QNAP's choice of Bay Trail for this market segment makes quite a bit of sense. For the SMB and high-end SOHO markets, the Intel Avoton and Rangeley platforms are the best bet. For home consumers and power users looking for a media server solution with mobile app support and ability to take advantage of Quick Sync, NAS units based on Bay Trail parts such as the Celeron J1800 make more sense. With the TS-451, QNAP has delivered a NAS that can handle a large number of simultaneous connections without drop in performance, a pre-requisite for a powerful media server. It also ticks all the boxes for a full-featured solution.
We do have use-cases in mind for evaluating the virtualization and transcoding features of the TS-451 for the upcoming articles. That said, it would be interesting to see what readers want to see evaluated when it comes to running virtual machines on a NAS, as well as what they would like to see done for evaluation of the real-time transcoding features. The feedback would be of great aid in shaping up the second and third parts of our TS-451 review.
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DanNeely - Monday, July 28, 2014 - link
I currently retire my old computers by making an image of their HD and parking it on my NAS so I can recover files and (theoretically) bring the whole system up as a VM or on spare hardware if I needed access to some software on it. As a result, I'd be interested in seeing how well it can run an image of a well used working computer in addition to the standard stripped down OS with a single application setup that a conventional VM hosts. I know Baytrail is much slower than the i7 of my main system; but knowing that all the cruft that accumulates after using a system for a half dozen years won't strangle the NAS would be reassuring.eliluong - Monday, July 28, 2014 - link
What software do you use to image your old drives? And what VM software do you boot it up in? Is the image usable, given that in the VM all the hardware will be different?Samus - Monday, July 28, 2014 - link
I just sysprep and capture the image with WDS which can redeploy using WinPE via PXE (network) or USB. I still use a Windows 2008 server for this, but 2012 with Hyper-V gives the flexibility of snapshots before/after sysprepping which helps prevent running into that sealing limitation (3 syspreps before it craps out) of images. I typically refresh my corporate image quarterly with Windows Updates, Office Updates, Adobe Updates, Driver Updates, and profile tweaks.Hyper-V definitely has the edge on VMware for imaging because of how easy it is to convert a VXD to a universal image. You can go straight from Hyper-V to WDS, and vice versa (I can turn any PC on the network into a VXD through WDS capture, and virtualize, say, a legacy PC running legacy software that's currently on a KVM and annoying someone as they have to switch between it and their main PC. This is still preferable over XP Mode in Windows 7 because of XP Modes lack of snapshots, poor remote management and inability to backup while the machine is running.
eliluong - Monday, July 28, 2014 - link
Thanks for the informative reply. I'm not in the IT field so this new to me. I've dabbled with virtual machines, but not in this manner. For a home-use case, where I have a 500GB system running XP that I want to have accessible in a virtualized environment, is this something what you described is capable of, or is it intended to just run one or two applications?Samus - Monday, July 28, 2014 - link
You could use VMware, XP Mode or Hyper-V (Windows 2012 Server) to completely emulate a PC. VMWare and Hyper-V both offer tools to take an image of a physical machine and turn it into a virtual machine. They do this by stripping the HAL (hardware layer) and generalizing the image, so the next time it boots up, whether it be on different physical hardware are emulated virtual hardware, it rebuilds the HAL. In Windows 7, you'll see "detecting hardware" on the first boot, in Windows XP, it actually just goes through the second-phase of the XP setup again.Vista and Windows 7 brought Windows PE (preexecution environment) into the picture which makes low-level Windows deployment easier. For example, if your XP machine is running IDE mode (not AHCI) it's pretty tricky to get it to run in a Hyper-V machine, but there is a lengthy process for doing so. Windows Vista and newer can dynamically boot between SATA controllers, command configurations, etc. Windows 8 is even better, having the most feature-rich WinPE environment, with native bare-metal recovery (easily restore any system image to any hardware configuration without generalizing) but Windows 8 is hated on in corporate sectors, so us IT engineers are stuck dealing with Winodws 7's inferior manageability.
rufuselder - Thursday, October 9, 2014 - link
I like it, although I think there are some better storage options out there... /Rufus from http://www.consumertop.com/best-computer-storage-g...blaktron - Tuesday, July 29, 2014 - link
Hey, if you do this often enough, what you should do is just run your system off a vhdx right from the get go. Its actually pretty good for a couple of reasons if you don't mind losing a % or 2 of random performance and total space.Here is a link that explains what I am talking about, but Windows 7 and 8 support this, and it works pretty well:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh82569...
Oyster - Monday, July 28, 2014 - link
Since you asked for feedback, Ganesh:1) It goes without saying that all your reviews focus too heavily on the hardware. You need to dedicate more time to the software/OS and the app ecosystem for these offerings. I personally have a QNAP TS 470, and can't see myself switching to a competitor unless their offerings consist of basic functionality like "ipkg", myQNAPcloud, Qsync, etc. There's no way for me to reach a decision unless you cover these areas :).
2) For VM performance, I realize that most of the NAS vendors are going to want you to benchmark under ideal conditions (e.g. iSCSI only). But it would be awesome if you can cover non-iSCSI performance.
3) Please, please add an additional test to cover the effectiveness of these devices to recover from failures. This would allow us to figure out how effective the RAID software implementation is.
Thanks.
Kevin G - Monday, July 28, 2014 - link
I'll second the request for some more attention to software and failure recovery.ganeshts - Monday, July 28, 2014 - link
I already do testing for RAID rebuild after simulating a drive failure by just yanking out one of the disks at random. Rebuild times as well as power consumption numbers for that operation are reported in the review. In case of any issues, I do make a note of what was encountered (for example, in this review, I noted that reinserting a disk with pre-existing partitions might sometime cause the 'hot-swap' rebuild to not take effect.What other 'failure recovery' testing do you want to see?