QNAP TS-879 Pro

Qnap TS-879 Pro

If your shared data or storage needs are greater than a four-bay box will handle, the eight-bay QNAP TS-879 Pro is just what the doctor ordered. With 2GB of memory and an Intel Core i3-2120 CPU, it's fast and then some. It also sports dual gigabit ethernet ports for failover protection and aggregation, plus QNAP's feature-rich operating system. But it's expensive: $2199 (as of March 23, 2012) without drives, and $2920 with 6TB of hard drives. The TS-879 Pro is built like a tank, with eight front-mounted bays. In our roundup of 11 NAS boxes, only it and its cousin, the QNAP TS-459 Pro II, support 6GB/s SATA as well as drives with capacities greater than 2.2TB. The front of the unit contains a status display and a rocker selection/enter button for configuring the RAID array on the first run. Also on the front are a USB 3.0 port and a quick-copy button for transferring data onto the box from attached drives. The back of the TS-879 Pro houses the ethernet ports, four USB 2.0 ports, a second USB 3.0 port, two eSATA ports, and three relatively unusual port types: a VGA connector for proprietary diagnostics, an HDMI port that lets you attach a monitor to display the output from video surveillance cameras, and an opening for the box's expansion slot that supports gigabit and 10 gigabit ethernet cards.