QNAP Offers 9-bay AMD Quad-Core NAS TS-963X

Discussion in 'Frontpage news' started by Hilbert Hagedoorn, May 8, 2018.

  1. Hilbert Hagedoorn

    Hilbert Hagedoorn Don Vito Corleone Staff Member

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    QNAP unveiled the TS-963X, a 9-bay NAS with an AMD quad-core 2.0 GHz processor, up to 8 GB RAM (can be upgraded to 16 GB), and 10GBASE-T connectivity supporting five connection speeds (10G/5G/2.5G/1G/...

    QNAP Offers 9-bay AMD Quad-Core NAS TS-963X
     
  2. schmidtbag

    schmidtbag Ancient Guru

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    Interesting that they chose a CPU from 2014, though for a NAS I'm sure it's plenty fast enough.
     
  3. SamuelL421

    SamuelL421 Master Guru

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    Impressive hardware, but I would love to see one of these at a decent price point with a "real" 35-65w laptop/desktop processor. I have an older QNAP that is Intel based (celeron or atom, can't recall without looking it up), it's great for everything except decoding / streaming certain formats or anything greater than HD. I am willing to bet that this old AMD quad isn't much more competent than lowly processor.

    Considering the 9 bays, running a media server probably isn't the first priority if you are purchasing this to do some serious backups... even still, I wish there was NAS solution in the 500-1000 range that had all this storage and a beefier cpu
     
  4. schmidtbag

    schmidtbag Ancient Guru

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    The GPU is would be the biggest change vs what you have now. If you can take advantage of it, then you would notice a difference.

    I think this could probably handle 4K. I built my own home server (which also acts as a NAS) which has a very similar CPU to what you find in this QNAP (it's a socket AM1 Athlon). Depending on the protocol and network interface you use, you can play 4K content. With my server, I can play 4K videos over ethernet and a media player like VLC using SMB. Doing that over wifi sometimes results in buffering. I don't remember if I tried testing with a DLNA service; my primary setup that is compatible with DLNA doesn't support 4K.

    IMO, buying a pre-made NAS is when you want a quick and easy solution, but you're probably not going to get the best possible experience. Building your own is usually pretty easy and cost-effective, but doing it right takes some time. An ITX board usually has everything you need. If you need more drives, just get a PCIe RAID controller - not like you're going to use the PCIe slot for anything else.
     

  5. slyphnier

    slyphnier Guest

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  6. wavetrex

    wavetrex Ancient Guru

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    "9 bay"... False.

    This is a 5-HDD nas with extra 4 slots which are almost useless since very few people put SSD's in a NAS (unless they have a very, very specific workload which requires low access time).

    And using laptop 2.5" drives would be really weird, since they are considerably more expensive for the capacity they offer, slow like a snail and limited to 2TB max if I'm not mistaking.

    I'd rather have a proper 8-bay NAS that supports 3.5" drives in all of them and can do Raid 6 on all 8 drives for a lovely 75% capacity and very strong data integrity.
     
  7. schmidtbag

    schmidtbag Ancient Guru

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    There are 2.5" drives that go up to 5TB, and have surprisingly reasonable prices:
    https://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&IsNodeId=1&N=100167524 601189459 601273164
    You could get 9 of such drives and put those in RAID; there are conversion trays. There are also some high-performance 2.5" drives (albeit, they're SAS):
    https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA6CC6KC0450

    But in a NAS, just about any 5400RPM drive offers sufficient performance if you cache your data and use RAID (and if you've got 8 drives, you probably are using RAID). I'm personally using a couple of 2.5" 5400RPM dives in RAID1 for my server and the only time it's especially slow is when building up thumbnails, but I don't mind waiting 3 seconds for them to load if it means reducing noise and power consumption on slower drives. I personally am never in a hurry when doing writes, and sequential read performance has kept up with my workloads, albeit, just barely.

    So yes, there are actually 9 usable bays. Of course, 3.5" drives will give you more/better options, but this is a pretty small platform. There are a lot of NASes out there - if 3.5" drives are what you want/need, go for them.

    EDIT:
    Actually you just inspired me to find a way to improve the random read times of my server. I'm thinking of just recursively running "cat /folders/containing/many/files > /dev/null" whenever the system boots. That should cache all of the files into RAM without actually taking up RAM space from other applications. I probably don't have enough RAM for this, but I can probably do this with my most used folders.
     
    Last edited: May 8, 2018
  8. vbetts

    vbetts Don Vincenzo Staff Member

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  9. schmidtbag

    schmidtbag Ancient Guru

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    Kind of makes you wonder how much cheaper this would be if it didn't include any memory and you just bought it all yourself...
     
  10. vbetts

    vbetts Don Vincenzo Staff Member

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    If you can find AM1 cpu's and motherboards, they would make a great little NAS with OpenNas for example. They lack sata ports, but if you have at least 1 PCIE slot you can always get a sata controller with little to no performance drawbacks being a third party controller. At our STEM school here in Toledo, there was a project for 7th and 8th graders to make a NAS rack using laptops and a laptop cart, each laptop being a single drive and network location/folder. That's how flexible OpenNas is! :D
     

  11. schmidtbag

    schmidtbag Ancient Guru

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    That is pretty much verbatim what I have done myself, though I did use one of the integrated SATA ports for the boot drive. I meanwhile have the entire system (including PSU) passively cooled. The drives are too small and slow to be heard. Under full CPU load, the entire computer uses roughly 35W. Never gets beyond 55C.
    Sounds like a nice project - helps encourage kids to be more resourceful with retired PCs.
     

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