QNAP TS-439 Pro Turbo NAS

Aug 25th, 2009 | By Simon

The physical setup of the TS-439 is not very difficult. To get the NAS up and running, you could start with as few as one drive and upgrade to four when time and money permits. However, if you have four drives ready to use, go right for it! The drive bays are latched in and can be locked to keep thieves at bay. It’s a four step procedure to install the drive cage starting with positioning it between the appropriate guides, sliding the cage in, snapping it against the SATA data and power cable and flipping the latch down to ensure the cafe in place.

To install the hard drives, the drive cage needs to be completely removed. A hard drive can be positioned and screwed into place from below. Use a total of four screws per drive to ensure it doesn’t move while being installed.

Once the drives have been installed, you must provide power and network to the TS-439. It is then optional if you wish to connect additional USB or eSATA storage or a printer.

Upon powering, various LEDs will light up and the LCD display will indicate what stage of start up the TS-439 is currently in.

As I mentioned before, you can setup the TS-439 without using a PC. However, you will miss a lot of the features that make the TS-439 standout from the rest.

Let’s take a look at the software. When you first start using the TS-439, it’ll need to be “found” on your network. QNAP has provided “QNAP Finder” just for that – it will scan your network and begin the configuration process; this includes installing the firmware.

The original CD provides a basic firmware that has been used for quite a while. It works well, but has poor usability. The new firmware (version 3.1.0) available online is a must get. It is not only easier to navigate, it adds Virtual Disk and iSCSI to the already extensive list of features.

Some background information on Virtual Disks and iSCSI:

The unique “Virtual Disk Drive” adds flexibility to expand the capacity of NAS. By using the built-in iSCSI initiator, the NAS can connect to other iSCSI targets on the network and turn them into virtual disks, which become multiple single volumes on the NAS. Up to 8 virtual disks can be stacked. The NAS serves as the storage stack chaining master. The user only needs to connect to this single entry (QNAP NAS) and is able to reach and use all the iSCSI target storages on the network.

iSCSI, (Internet Small Computer System Interface), an Internet Protocol (IP)-based storage networking standard for linking data storage facilities. By carrying SCSI commands over IP networks, iSCSI is used to facilitate data transfers over intranets and to manage storage over long distances. iSCSI can be used to transmit data over local area networks (LANs), wide area networks (WANs), or the Internet and can enable location-independent data storage and retrieval.

An all-in-one storage solution with high ability of expansion and low establishment cost is always seeked out by SMB storage infrastructure planners who have budget concerns and overall ease of deployment. With the iSCSI service on QNAP Turbo NAS it can instantly be served as your storage expansion or backup destination of the application servers, such as database server, mail server, or Time Machine (for Mac OS X 10.5 or later) in the business environment.

Here are all the menu pages available for configuration: