Squishnet

QNAP TS-219P+

Posted on 07 April 2011

I’ve been looking to add some new network attached storage for my home network. I wanted something that would provide NFS and iSCSI access to use with my virtualization lab as well as simple CIFS/SMB for use as shared storage. 

A collegue mentioned QNAP as one option and I began doing some research on them. The units have a very full feature set and a review at Smallnetbuilder.com showed good performance data . I went ahead and purchased the Qnap TS-219p+ along with 2 SAMSUNG EcoGreen F2 HD154UI 1.5TB 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5″ Internal Hard Drives. These are 5400 RPM drives with a manufacturer reported maximum transfer rate of 300 MB/sec. Tom’s Hardware lists this same drive as having 107 MB/s maximum transfer speed in their testing.   The QNAP TS-219p+ is not on the Vmware HCL but I had no issues adding the NFS mount to my ESXi 4.1 host.

QNAP TS-219p+ Specs

CPU: Marvell 6282 1.6GHz

DRAM: 512MB DDRIII RAM

Flash Memory: 16MB

HDD: 2 x 3.5″ and 2.5” SATA II HDD

HDD Tray: 2 x hot-swappable tray

LAN Port: 1 x Gigabit RJ-45 Ethernet port

USB: 3 x USB 2.0 port (Front:1 Back: 2)
Supports USB printer, disk, pen drive, USB hub, and USB UPS, etc.

eSATA: 2 x eSATA port (Back)

Power Consumption (W)
Sleep mode: 7W
In operation: 19W (with 2 x 500GB HDD installed)

File System

• Internal HDD: EXT3, EXT4
• External HDD: EXT3, EXT4, NTFS, FAT32, HFS+

Networking

• TCP/IP (IPv4 & IPv6: Dual Stack)
• Jumbo Frames
• DHCP Client, DHCP Server
• Protocols: CIFS/SMB, AFP (3.1), NFS, FTP, HTTP, HTTPS, Telnet, SSH, iSCSI and SNMP.
• iSCSI
• Network Service Discovery (UPnP, Bonjour)
• USB Wi-Fi 802.11n Adapter Support (Optional Purchase)

Network File Sharing

• CIFS/SMB (Plus DFS Support)
• AFP
• NFS
• FTP
• WebDAV

Disk Management

• Single Disk, JBOD, RAID 0 / 1

Performance Testing

I used Iometer to benchmark NFS and iSCSI performance of the QNAP TS-219P+.  For a test setup I configured the unit as Raid 0 and used a Windows XP SP3 VM configured with 1 GB RAM and 1 vCPU.  My initial results have been redacted due to an issue I discovered with my hyper-visor hardware that caused poor throughput and iops numbers.  My colleague Jason does a lot of testing of storage and virtualiztion and offered to re-test my Qnap on his infrastructure.  His results were much better and more in line with my expectations.

Conclusions

The Qnap 219p+  has a polished UI and an impressive feature set.  Overall IOPS and throughput performance are quite good for a 2 disk soho NAS system (considering I was using 5400 RPM drives).  Although the 219p+ is not on the VMware HCL, it integrated into my vmware lab seamlessly.  I was able to attach both NFS and iSCSI datastores in ESXi 4.1 without problem.  A comparison of performancevs. the Iomega Ix2-200 showed the QNAP besting it in most categories (interestingly the Iomega edged out the QNAP in iSCSI for the 60% Random, 65% Read and Random 8K 70% read tests).  The Ix2-200 costs several hundred dollars less than the QNAP + drives so it is worth a look if you want to save a few dollars.  The Ix2-200 is also listed on the VMware HCL, whereas the QNAP 219p+ is not.

One thing that I did not expect to see was the disparity between the NFS and iSCSI performance.  In some cases, NFS performed at almost 1.5x that of NFS.  If you are looking for a flexible, full featured and well built soho NAS, I would highly recommend looking at QNAP.