Every year at around this time, two things always happen: The obvious being the start of a new academic year; the second being time for us to grab a refreshed line of QNAP network attached storage system for review. For those who are currently working, good on you. For those who have not yet begun their post-secondary education, enjoy life while you still can. For those who are currently in university -- especially if you happen to be in engineering like yours truly -- prepare to be asterisk asterisk asterisk asterisked for yet another eight months, haha. Two years ago, we took the QNAP TS-409 in for testing, and used it on a daily basis for one year. While it offered brilliant reliability and impeccable uptime, its performance suffered greatly from a lack of horsepower under the hood. Last year, QNAP brought us the QNAP TS-439 Pro, which delivered the reliability and stability we have come to expect from the company after a full year of continuous usage. Thanks to its vastly improved hardware, it also took performance to a completely different level over its predecessor. The downside came down to being still a little too expensive for the specifications you get on paper (QNAP later released the TS-459 Pro a few months later with a dual core processor). This time around, the quality network appliance provider began shipping its latest line of refreshed network storage systems with the new Intel Atom D525 1.8GHz dual core processor. How well does the new hardware step up against QNAP's offerings from last year? We took the 5-bay version of the Pro+ series NAS, the TS-559 Pro+, for a spin, and will retain it as our main file server for the next year for our long term tests.



Link: APH Networks