Analysis
Network storage is primarily used in enterprises and server farms, but it can also be used in a home. After all, who among us doesn’t have hundreds of photos and videos on our smartphones or cameras. Also not to forget regular backups and external HDDs, which are not really practical in this regard. But what to do if you’re looking for an affordable and quiet NAS, but with premium connectivity and six slots?
Package and analysis
At the outset, it should be mentioned that you will come across the TS-435XeU in a series of articles on 10 Gb networking in the home, and its server rack format lends itself to this. Most household NAS units have a tower format, or a tiny tower where the HDD/SSD are placed vertically. However, the tested piece is a typical 1U tall and 19″ wide piece designed for the vast majority of racks. But the interesting thing is the short depth, which is only 29 cm, so you can fit the whole device into a smaller rack, which is definitely appreciated in a home environment. So much for the introduction, let’s take a closer look at the NAS and the contents of its packaging.
You will receive the NAS in a cardboard box with foam padding inside to protect it from possible damage (typically in transit). The outer packaging does not have any interesting graphics, it is just a raw monochrome cardboard. Inside the package, besides the NAS, you will find a power cable and a tiny box with accessories.
Specifically, there are screws for mounting a 3.5″ HDD (16 pcs), and a 2.5″ SSD (12 pcs), a pair of rack mount ears with screws, and rounded brackets to allow for easier removal, a Cat-6A Ethernet cable for 10-gigabit connectivity, and finally, the aforementioned power cable.
The layout of the ports and drawers is simple, with four 3.5″ HDD and SSD bays in the front and the rest of the connectivity in the back. Specifically in the middle is a pair of 10 Gb SFP+ connectors and a quartet of USB ports, with two being 5 Gb standard 3.2 Gen 1 and the remaining two being the classic USB 2.0.
Then there’s a pair of 2.5 Gb RJ-45 Ethernet ports on one side and a power connector on the other. Not forgetting the trio of 40mm fans that are evenly spaced along the back.
A few close-ups on the equipment and LED indicators that show activity and disk usage or system status.
Four 3.5″ drive bays allow for easy removal without tools, but installing the storage already requires screws and a screwdriver. Unfortunately, the drawers cannot be locked, which can be a problem in an enterprise environment. But before we get into installing HDDs and SSDs, let’s take a look at the insides of our NAS.
To remove the top cover, just remove a few screws and gently slide it towards the rear. We then have the opportunity to take a look inside the TS-435XeU. This is half made up of just the 3.5″ HDD bays in the front, then at the back we can see a green PCB with a few components. On the bottom right is the power supply, in the middle are two positions for M.2 SSDs.
Čo NAS poháňa? First of all, it’s the four-core processor ARMv8 Marvell OCTEON TX2 CN9131 with Cortex-A72 cores. This is a similar, or almost identical processor to the one we saw in the Qnap Qhora-322 router. In addition to it, there is also 4 GB of RAM, just like in the router mentioned above. Here, however, it is freely available and, thanks to the SODIMM format for laptops, it is also interchangeable for a maximum 32 GB module. The 4 GB of memory is intended for the operating system with Dual Boot OS protection.
In addition to the aforementioned components, there is also a trio of 40 mm fans that you can also replace in case of failure. Unlike larger or more expensive models, however, there is no option for expansion with PCIe cards and the built-in connectivity is the most you get from this NAS.
Let’s move on to the installation of storage drives. Since I have the NAS open, the first one will be the WD Red SN700 M.2 SSD. Installation is tool-less, the motherboard has a sort of plastic tooth to hold the SSD in place. However, it should be noted that both M.2 connectors are PCIe 3.0 only and limited to one lane only. Thus, there is no point in installing fast PCIe 4.0 SSDs, which would be unnecessarily constrained. So you’d better prefer higher capacity over high speed.
This is followed by the installation of inch HDDs and SSDs, which we also have from WD. Specifically, the WD Red SA500 for the 2.5″ SSD and the WD Red Plus for the 3.5″ HDD.
Installing the HDD and SSD only takes a few minutes, but it could be faster. You have to screw the inch storage formats to the drawers, so there’s no tool-less mechanism like I’ve encountered with other models. We’ll of course test the speeds offered by solid state storage in various interfaces, and we’ll also take a look at the configuration and partitioning options and software features offered by our NAS.
Before we get into the testing and software side of things, there’s one more interesting hardware detail. The NAS is surprisingly quiet and low-power due to its compact size and power-saving processor. According to the manufacturer, it draws just shy of 30W in normal operation and only 17W when the drives are asleep. The manufacturer also states that the noise level at a distance of one meter is only 20 dB(A). This is one of the reasons why I was intrigued by this particular device. No one wants a noisy NAS in their home, but this is often the case with server-based network storage. However, the TS-435XeU is the exception that proves the rule.
Network storage is primarily used in enterprises and server farms, but it can also be used in a home. After all, who among us doesn’t have hundreds of photos and videos on our smartphones or cameras. Also not to forget regular backups and external HDDs, which are not really practical in this regard. But what to do if you’re looking for an affordable and quiet NAS, but with premium connectivity and six slots?
QTS and Qfinder
Similar to the QHora-322 router, we had the opportunity to work with the QuRouter web interface, QNAP offers the QTS operating system with web interface with NAS as well. The Qfinder app is also helpful to help you locate the NAS on your network and perform various actions.
When you first start the NAS, you have to initialize it, set up your account, network parameters, time, and so on.
After a restart, you will be able to log in with the login details you created and the IP address you entered. Alternatively, you can use Qfinder again as you did on initial startup. It will now show that the NAS is fully functional. A large number of instructions and tutorials will then pop up, which you can view or skip.
Once you’ve gone through all the initial windows, you’re taken to the home screen, where there are a number of hidden sidebars with settings, information and various functions or shortcuts.
The next step will be to create storage from the drives we have mounted in the NAS. There are a number of options here, but for the test we’ll use the very simplest solution of static storage on a single drive and create three of these to test the speeds of the M.2, SSD and HDD separately. Of course this is just for demonstration, in practice, different combinations of RAID and using a storage pool with different volumes would make sense. We’ll look at this at least briefly later.
After initializing a trio of separate storage locations, we can connect them as network drives in Windows, again using Qfinder. This configuration is then useful for testing transfer speeds.
During the tests we were also able to monitor the activity of the drives or the network adapter.
The operating system is of course updateable, the current version is 5.0.1 and the last build is from mid-January.
The following gallery shows the many settings you can find in QTS.
In storage management, you’ll find various advanced features like automating disk maintenance, snapshot creation, and of course storage pool and volume balancing, which we’ve already covered. You will also find detailed information about the drives in use, including their health or temperature.
The system also offers several applications for log tracking, license management, and system status information.
In the control panel, you can manage users, groups or shared directories.
Another important section is network connection management, where you can create virtual switches, connect a wireless module, configure VLANs, IP addresses, DNS and so on.
Other network functions offer Mac and Windows settings, SSH, Telnet, SNMP, UPnP, as well as network recycle bin management.
In the applications, you will find different types of servers including a web-based one or a MariaDB database.
Other apps are available in the App Center, which is the equivalent of Google Play or the App Store we know from mobile devices. You’ll also find lots of different apps here, whether for work, content consumption, tools or security. It’s a sort of mix of apps directly from Qnap but also from third parties. Of particular interest will be Plex, phpMyAdmin, Python and the like.
Let’s go back to the storage, which offers more features than we’ve shown so far. After the speed tests, I started configuring the drives for real-world use, so below you’ll find a set of demos dedicated to acceleration with SSD caching, creating different Storage pools with Qtier and volume. For now, I’m playing around with these settings and in a future article I’ll let you know what is the final configuration I’ve decided on.
Another important application that you’ll be working with quite often is FileStation. This is used to manage folders and files, but also for backup snapshots.
In the quick settings on the home desktop, you can change the wallpaper, enable 2-factor authentication, add SSH keys, or change the password. You can also change the amount of time after which QTS should log out.
QTS is really extensive and so far we have only looked at the basic features. In future tests of Qnap products, we’ll have a chance to take another look at the system and try some different things than we did today.
Network storage is primarily used in enterprises and server farms, but it can also be used in a home. After all, who among us doesn’t have hundreds of photos and videos on our smartphones or cameras. Also not to forget regular backups and external HDDs, which are not really practical in this regard. But what to do if you’re looking for an affordable and quiet NAS, but with premium connectivity and six slots?
Speed test
In the previous chapter, we said that we have installed all three types of supported drives in the NAS – HDD, 2.5″ and M.2 SDD. For each of them, we created a custom volume that will allow us to test read and write performance on each of those drives. This is the simplest form of testing, sometime in the future we may also look at performance when using different RAID types. However, that deserves an article of its own. It’s also important to note that in the practical tests we only used the 10G SFP+ connector, while in the synthetic tests we also tested the 2.5G RJ-45 Ethernet port.
Write: Practical tests
Practical write tests show the expected results – that M.2 NVMe SSDs offer the highest speeds. However, a significant difference can only be seen with the largest 9 GB file, where it is up to three times faster. With smaller sizes, the difference compared to the 2.5″ SATA SSD shrinks to 5 to 20%. The HDD is the slowest and only comes close to the rest of the drives with the smallest 427–1235 kB and 12–59 kB files.
Write: Synthetic tests
Synthetic write tests show similar results to the practical ones, but this time the SATA SSD also achieved higher speeds at the limit of the drive itself and the SATA interface. You can also notice how the connection used – SFP+ or RJ-45 affects the speed. The slower 2.5G ethernet slows down both SSD types considerably, but especially during sequential writes. For smaller files, the drive itself is already the limiting factor and not the interface.
Read: Practical tests
Practical read tests show minor differences between M.2 and SATA SSDs, but the trend is almost identical. NVMe offers the highest speeds of the available interfaces, although it is still severely limited due to the availability of only one PCIe 3.0 lane per drive.
Read: Synthetic tests
The synthetic read tests are interesting, as virtually all drives performed equally in them, which is really a surprise. Especially for HDDs, where we haven’t seen such big numbers in sequential reads so far. So these tests rather better illustrate for us the difference between 2.5G and 10G connections, which is almost double in the sequential tests, although theoretically it should be up to four times as much. However, we would need a faster M.2 interface for that.
Power draw
We measure the power draw with a new methodology using a UNI-T UT71E multimeter. The measurement was carried out during the whole testing, which lasted several hours. During that time, the average power draw was stable at 27 W and rarely exceeded 30 W. With inactive drives it drops down to 14 W. Even at full load, the fans are not very audible and only make the biggest noise at boot, when power draw jumps to 46 W. These results only confirm my assumptions that thanks to the ARM processor used, the operation will be very quiet and low-power.
Network storage is primarily used in enterprises and server farms, but it can also be used in a home. After all, who among us doesn’t have hundreds of photos and videos on our smartphones or cameras. Also not to forget regular backups and external HDDs, which are not really practical in this regard. But what to do if you’re looking for an affordable and quiet NAS, but with premium connectivity and six slots?
Evaluation
The QNAP TS-435XeU-4G is a NAS that impresses primarily with its low-profile 1U design for use in servers, but due to its low power draw and noise level, it is also suitable for a home environment. It is therefore not the case that you don’t even want to hear about server components at home because of their noise and power draw, at least in this case. The situation will definitely be different with a big and powerful Xeon/Epyc processor, but the ARM from Marvell is perfect for home use. Data backup and content streaming can be handled without any problems, moreover, thanks to the above-standard connectivity, it will not be a problem to connect the NAS to a 10 Gb switch or directly to a PC.
I also praise the presence of USB ports that can be used for easy data transfers from external storage. It’s just a pity that they are not in the front, because if you have a rack with a full rear panel, it will be quite difficult to get to them. In this situation, you’ll also appreciate how small this network storage is, as it uses a significantly scaled-down format compared to conventional server components. For easier handling, you can also get rails that allow you to slide the NAS out of the rack, but I didn’t have those available.
The pair of 2.5G RJ-45 and 10G SFP+ connectors is a really solid base even for the advanced user, it’s just a shame that there’s no room for a PCIe expansion card, which would allow you to get 10G RJ-45 or possibly higher speeds with SFP28 than 25G. On the other hand, you probably wouldn’t even be able to take advantage of higher transfer speeds, as the fastest storage you can fit is M.2 SSDs limited to PCI 3.0×1, which is 1GB/sec, approximately. Practically only a RAID 0 configuration would be able to use more than a 10G connection, and striping isn’t exactly a safe method for data storage. So for home or small business use I see no limits, unless your workflow requires higher real speeds than 1 GB/s, in which case you’ll need to reach for higher pure SSD models.
Strengths definitely include the QTS operating system or the service applications, which include Qfinder. The many features and uses of QTS are hard to fit into this review, but even from this short test we can say that the system is clear and easy to use for the layman, but even an advanced user will not get bored with it. Managing disks and creating storage pools and volumes is clearly outlined, yet I recommend playing around with it a bit before you get to the ideal combination. The large number of apps in the App Center, on the other hand, allow you to use the NAS for non-backup tasks, such as virtualization or different types of servers. There are so many options that you could spend days, even weeks, on them.
It is hard to find negatives, because it is a very specific product that I chose because of its low power draw and noise, but at the same time sufficient storage capacity and the possibility of connecting M.2 SSD and SSD cache function. The 1U server format will not be the most traditional solution in a home, but we will come across it in a series of articles on 10G home networking. This NAS will also be included in those articles.
Let us know in the comments how you back up your data, whether you use a NAS from one of the major manufacturers – Qnap or Synology, or even if there are some connoisseurs who have built their own on TrueNAS or another solution.
English translation and edit by Jozef Dudáš
| Qnap TS-435XeU |
| + Compact size with 1U height and half depth |
| + As many as six positions for inch format HDD/SSDs |
| + Low power draw and noise – suitable for home use as well |
| + QTS OS offers a wealth of features |
| + Easy to set up and use even for the layman |
| - Lacks the possibility of expansion via PCIe slot |
| - Poorer access to USB ports |
| - M.2 slots are limited to PCIe 3.0 ×1 with approx. 1 GB/s |