Qnap TS-1277
The first Ryzen-powered NAS appliance delivers top performance – and great data protection features
SCORE PRICE Diskless TS-1277-1700-16GB, £2,514 exc VAT from span.com
AMD’s Ryzen processors have been a big success in the desktop PC market, but they haven’t thus far made their presence felt in the world of business appliances. That changes now, with Qnap’s TS-1277 – the world’s first Ryzen-powered desktop NAS appliance. Aside from the powerful CPU, this big golden box offers eight hot-swap LFF drive bays for general data storage, plus four SFF bays for performance-enhancing cache duties, dual internal M.2 SSD slots and three PCI-Express expansion slots.
Connectivity is just as generous. Round the back you’ll find four Gigabit Ethernet sockets, six standard USB 3 ports and even two 10Gbits/sec USB 3.1 ports, presented as Type-A and Type-C sockets. On our review model, it’s all powered by an eightcore 3GHz Ryzen 7 1700 CPU and 16GB of DDR4 memory, expandable to 64GB; if that sounds like overkill, you can save over £400 by stepping down to the six-core Ryzen 5 1600 edition, which comes with 8GB of memory.
A meaty processor naturally needs appropriate cooling, and that’s handled here by a passive heatsink partnered by two blower modules, along with three chassis fans at the rear. That may sound like a lot of spinning parts, but it’s all very quiet; the SPLnFFT iOS app on our iPad reported sound levels of only 38dB at 1m in front.
For testing, we fitted four 10TB Seagate IronWolf NAS drives into the tool-free carriers and installed an Emulex dual-port 10GBase-T adapter. It’s worth noting that this 167mm card would only fit in the innermost expansion slot – the CPU cooler restricts the outer two slots to 150mm.
Deployment was a cinch. Qnap’s QFinder utility discovered the appliance on our network and immediately offered to set it up. We opted for a big 27TB RAID5 thinstorage pool, and were shortly greeted by Qnap’s QTS 4.3.4 software.
One great strength of this platform is its wealth of data protection features, including smart IP SAN snapshot services. These are a step ahead of the competition, as they support standard EXT4 file systems and don’t require BTRFS.
It’s all very easy to configure too, thanks to the new Storage and Snapshots app. We had no problem
“You can restore entire NAS shares and iSCSI LUNs, or dip into your snapshots and recover individual files as needed”
selecting NAS shares and iSCSI LUNs, taking snapshots on demand and scheduling them for regular intervals. When it’s time for recovery, you can restore entire NAS shares and iSCSI LUNs, or dip into your snapshots and recover individual files as needed.
Cloud support is superb as well: the Cloud Backup Sync app supports for 12 different providers, while Qsync Central handles file syncing with remote clients. The Connect to Cloud Drive app also let us browse our cloud storage accounts directly from the web console.
So much for the features: what about performance? As you’d hope, this too was top notch. A share mapped to a Dell PowerEdge R640 Xeon Scalable server delivered superb sequential Iometer read and write rates of 9.2Gbits/sec and 8.9Gbits/ sec. And when we upped the pressure with a dual 10GbE MPIO link, read and write speeds ramped up to 17.7Gbits/sec and 16.8Gbits/sec – with the Ryzen CPU registering only 11% utilisation.
In all, the TS-1277 is an immensely capable NAS appliance. Its Ryzen CPU delivers excellent performance, there’s plenty of room for growth – and Qnap’s QTS software delivers a superb range of data protection features. SPECIFICATIONS Desktop chassis 3GHz AMD Ryzen 7 1700 CPU
16GB DDR4 (max 64GB) 8 x LFF/4 x SFF hot-swap SATA drive bays 2 x M.2 22110 SSD slot supports RAID0, 1, 5, 6, 10, 50, 60 4 x Gigabit Ethernet 6 x USB 3 2 x USB 3.1 3 x PCI-Express 3.5mm audio in/out 550W internal PSU 370 x 320 x 235mm (WDH) 3yr RTB warranty