Conclusion
The QNAP 509 Pro is a very sophisicated and complete NAS system which will find its worth in many a home or business network system. Thankfully when compared to the 409 U they have lowered the noise levels, upgraded the memory to 1GB and slotted in a 1.6ghz Celeron CPU. There is also support now for a total of 5 hard drives.
At time of press the unit is for sale at £609.83 inc vat from The QNAP store and while this may be rather expensive for home use, if you have a sophisticated gigabit network then the benefits seen in our review are quite apparent.
Our testing showed that the lack of jumbo frame support might affect overall transfer bandwidth if you have a high quality gigabit switch, however the differences don't seem to be massive when we compare with some prior testing on older units. That said I hope that QNAP add this feature in the next revision as enabling MTU with 9000 bytes can increase large file transfer speeds slightly.
The device as a whole is well organised and thought out and over the years they have been able to take feedback from users and adapt the 509 pro to be the most complete NAS system available today on the market, certainly for the modest price.
Pros:
- Very easy configuration and setup options
- LCD screen
- Build Quality
- Low Noise
- Good Cooling
- Wake On Lan
- RAID and HOT SPARE options
- Dual Network Failover and Load Balancing
- Great Performance
- Schedule functions add a wealth of flexibility
Cons:
- No Jumbo Frames support
- No Telnet/SSH
- Rather expensive for home use
QNAP store is selling them with a £40 price reduction at time of press £519 (before VAT)
Excaliber PC $849.00
