QNAP upgrades NAS boxes with SATA 6Gbps and USB 3.0 support

Atom powered

QNAP has announced three new NAS boxes in the TS-x56 Pro II series which have gained DDR3 memory, SATA 6Gbps and USB 3.0 support which should make them some of the most feature rich NAS boxes on the market. This should make them compelling storage solutions for smaller businesses, as neither model is likely to be priced for home use unless you’ve got really deep pockets.

The three new models are the TS-459 Pro II, TS-559 Pro II and TS-659 Pro II and they each have four, five and six drive bays which each can be fitted with a 3TB SATA drive for 12, 15 and 18TB of storage respectively. All three models are powered by a dual core Atom D525 and come with 1GB of unspecified DDR3 RAM as standard, although unusually for this type of product, it can be upgraded to 3GB. All three models also have a 512MB DOM for storing the OS.

Other features that all three models share includes dual Gigabit Ethernet ports, a front and a rear USB 3.0 port, four rear USB 2.0 ports and a pair of rear eSATA port. The USB ports can be used with a selection of external storage devices, printers, UPSs, streaming network media players and even USB Wi-Fi dongles. The front USB 3.0 port also sports a one touch backup button that copies all the data on the USB storage device into a directory on the NAS.

All three models support a wide range of RAID options, although the TS-459 Pro II doesn’t support the hot spare options due to lack of drive bays. Interestingly all three models support virtualized environments with support for VMware, Citrix and Windows Server 2008. In fact, each of the three models supports way too many features for us to list them here, so we suggest you head over to QNAP’s website if you’re interested in the full breakdown.

QNAP didn’t announce any pricing, although it’s safe to say that the new models are likely to be slightly more expensive than the current models. The TS-459 Pro+ retails for around $879 so we’d expect the TS-459 Pro II to come in at over $900. All three models should be available sometime in early April and hopefully we’ll see the new features trickle down to some more affordable models in the near future.S|A

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