We’re seeing a concerted move by many key NAS appliance manufacturers to deliver more storage capacity in less rack space. QNAP’s TS-x73AU series of appliances takes this to the next level as it offers a choice of 16-bay, 12-bay, and 8-bay models and all employ the same short-depth chassis that’s only 16.7 inches deep.
All are a great choice for space-poor SMBs, as they can be fitted in a small wall box, a standard data rack cabinet, or even placed on a desk. We review the 8-bay TS-873AU-RP which includes dual, hot-plug 300W PSUs although you can save around $280 as QNAP offers this model with a single, fixed 250W PSU (the 16-bay model has dual 550W PSUs).
As with all its stablemates, the TS-873AU-RP is powered by a quad-core 2.2GHz AMD Ryzen V1500B CPU and the base 4GB of DDR4 memory can be increased to a very usable 64GB. Multi-Gigabit is on the network menu as the appliance sports dual 2.5GbE ports and the two free PCI-E slots provide plenty of upgrade choices with support extended to a good range of 10GbE adapters.
The USB 3.2 ports can be used to expand capacity outside the box and QNAP offers a range of tower and rackmount disk shelves. However, if you’re fitting the appliance in a short-depth cabinet, the only viable USB-connected candidate is the TR004-U shelf which is actually 5 inches shorter in depth.
TS-873AU-RP Build and design
Build quality is up to the standard we expect from QNAP with the chassis constructed of solid steel. The non-lockable drive carriers are equipped with sturdy metal trays and for testing, we fitted four 16TB Seagate IronWolf Pro NAS drives. It’s worth noting that QNAP has already certified this appliance for Western Digital’s mighty 22TB Red Pro hard disks.
Sliding back the rear part of the lid reveals a small proprietary motherboard with the embedded Ryzen CPU fitted with a large passive heatsink. Only two SO-DIMM slots are provided so you’ll need to lose the resident 4GB module if you want to expand beyond 8GB.
The motherboard has a single surface-mounted PCI-E slot and uses a dual-slot riser card to provide two horizontal PCI-E 3 x4 slots at the rear. A legacy version of the TS-873AU-RP presents one vertical slot and will require the riser assembly to be purchased separately if you want two slots.
The appliance doesn’t have embedded M.2 SSD slots but you can add QNAP’s QM2 dual-slot expansion cards for a performance-boosting cache. Cooling is handled efficiently by two 9cms diameter fans and we found the appliance to be very quiet during operation making it a great choice for small offices.
TS-873AU-RP – QTS or QuTS?
QNAP’s QuTS OS provides advanced data protection features such as WORM for NAS shares
Installation is swift with the browser-based quick start wizard offering you the choice of loading QNAP’s QTS or QuTS operating systems. We opted to run our performance tests across both OSes but bear in mind that although you can swap from one to the other, you must backup your data and reinitialize the appliance first.
The web consoles are virtually the same and app choices for each OS are also very extensive. Backup tools are in abundance as along with scheduled NAS and iSCSI LUN snapshots, both OSes can run QNAP’s Hybrid Backup Sync (HBS) 3, Qsync Central, and HybridMount plus Hyper Data Protector for VMware and Hyper-V virtualized environments.
QNAP’s QuTS OS provides advanced data protection features such as WORM for NAS shares
QuTS is the best choice if you want enterprise-class data protection features as it offers ZFS copy-on-write for fast, near unlimited snapshots and end-to-end checksums for error recovery while in-line data deduplication and compression offer big storage savings. It supports triple parity RAID to protect against three drive failures or triple mirroring, NAS share data can be secured from tampering with one of two WORM (write once read many) policies and a new feature in QuTS 5.0.1 is support for encrypted iSCSI LUNs.
If you do opt for QuTS though, bear in mind you’ll probably need to upgrade the appliance’s memory. QuTS deduplication will be disabled until you install at least 16GB, a 512GB SSD cache also requires a minimum of 16GB and if you upgrade to 10GbE networking you may need up to 32GB to achieve the best performance.
QTS and QuTS 10GbE performance
For our performance tests, we created a RAID5 array, fitted an Emulex dual-port 10GbE card in the appliance, and linked it up over 10GbE to the lab’s Dell EMC T640 Xeon Scalable tower server running Windows Server 2019. There was little difference between both OSes for NAS performance with Iometer reporting just over 9Gbits/sec for sequential read and write operations.
Both QTS and QuTS offer a wealth of apps and you can remotely monitor the appliance from your mobile
Real-world performance is also in the same ballpark. Drag and drop copies of a 25GB test file averaged around 6.8Gbits for read and write operations while our 22.4GB folder with 10,500 small files was backed up at 2.1Gbits/sec.
Moving to IP SAN testing saw some notable differences. A 500GB iSCSI target created under QTS returned Iometer sequential read and write speeds of 8.8Gbits/sec and 9Gbits/secs with QuTS reporting 7.6Gbits/sec and 9.1Gbits/sec.
Next, we ramped up the pressure by creating a dual 10GbE MPIO link to the iSCSI target. For read performance, we saw QTS deliver 14.6Gbits/sec with QuTS managing only 8.4Gbits/sec, and swapping to write performance saw speeds of 9.3Gbits for QTS and 10.6Gbits/sec for QuTS.
Conclusion
QNAP’s TS-873AU-RP is ideal for space-poor SMBs as it packs a high storage density into its compact rack chassis. Support for both QTS and QuTS makes it very versatile although a significant memory upgrade will be required to get the best out of the latter.
That said, even with only 4GB of memory, overall 10GbE performance is good for both NAS and IP SAN services. Add in the impressive range of data protection features offered by both QTS and QuTS and SMBs will find the TS-873AU-RP a solid choice for file sharing and private cloud duties or as a high-capacity central backup vault.
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