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Hands-on review: QNAP TVS-882T - all new Thunderbolt 2 NAS technology
Thu, 15th Sep 2016
FYI, this story is more than a year old

The new family of business-grade NAS (drives- removed) from QNAP are great storage solution offerings for studio production and creative professionals. The new Thunderbolt NAS were designed to significantly improve efficiency and productivity for all the creative professionals that need to edit and share high resolution video and image files simultaneously.

The biggest announcement? They feature the QNAP Thunderbolt 2 NAS technology, the world's first DAS/NAS/iSCSI SAN triple solution, doubling the speed potential to 20Gb/s for enabling simultaneous 4K video transfer and display. It is also a perfect match for both Thunderbolt-equipped Mac and Windows users for 4K workflows, file storage and backup.

QNAP's all new TVS-x82T Series is made up of the TVS-682T, the TVS-882T and the TVS-1282T. They have 4, 6 and 8 3.5” drive bays respectively. The 4 and 6 bay units have two additional 2.5” drive slots, while the 8 bay unit has four.

In this review we're going to focus on the TVS-882T.

Look and feel

The TVS-882T has a sleek black-on-black housing with an LCD screen on the front panel. It has six 3.5” drive bays and two 2.5” drive bays. Despite its formidable storage capabilities, it is still relatively compact and could easily fit just about anywhere in an office.

The details

As already mentioned, the TVS-x82T Series has Thunderbolt 2 NAS, which is double the speed of of it's predecessor (Thunderbolt) and means you can move data to/from a peripheral up to 4 times faster than with USB 3 - that is fast!

The TVS-882T adopts 6th Generation Intel 14nm multi-core processors, tailored around the idea of tiered storage, application-based partitioning and network traffic distribution. It supports smooth 4K 60 fps video transfer and display, cross-platform file sharing, comprehensive backup and disaster recovery, iSCSI - virtualisation and more business applications.

Including smart cooling, two Thunderbolt 2 connectors, tool-less HDD tray and three HDMI outputs, this diagram sums up the hardware much better than I can:

The TVS-882T is designed for 4K media applications and directly tackles traditional bottleneck issues that affect content workflows.

With Thunderbolt 2 providing 20Gb/s throughput, it's capable of transferring 4K video smoothly and handling relative workloads with ease. Its large storage capacity allows to accommodate up to 64TB (with 8TB hard drive) files, or even more by scaling up with Thunderbolt storage expansion enclosures, providing the ideal storage solution ready for high-resolution raw files.

The Thunderbolt 2 NAS combines direct attached storage (DAS), network attached storage (NAS) and iSCSI-SAN into one box. It prevents the restriction of DAS connecting to only one device and breaks the cost barrier for constructing 10GbE high-speed network environments. This not only allows cross-platform file sharing via network as NAS but also provides convenient hot-pluggable connection as DAS

Here is a creative workflow scenario with the QNAP TVS-882T:

Highlights

The QNAP TVS-882T delivers the highest transfer rates ever as storage with persistent throughput, providing a complete business-ready storage solution.

Here are some of the features to take note of:

  • Built-in M.2 SATA 6Gb/s slots - 2.5” SSD slots
  • Qtier technology and SSD cache enable 24/7 optimised storage efficiency
  • The Network - Virtual Switch app assists network traffic distribution, and re-routes dedicated bandwidth for diverse applications
  • Triple HDMI output for smooth 4K video playback
  • Thunderbolt 2 (20Gbps) and 10GbE dual network for on-the-fly video editing and speedy sharing
  • 4 available combinations with Mac/PC and JBOD for flexible attaching, sharing and expansion
  • Scalable up to 432 TB with the Thunderbolt 2 storage expansion enclosures
  • Virtual JBOD (VJBOD) allows to use QNAP NAS to expand the  TVS-882T's storage capacity
  • Supports QRM+ unified remote server management, QvPC technology, virtual machine and container applications, and storage for virtualisation
Verdict

The QNAP TVS-882T combines multiple cutting-edge technologies into one box, making it ideal for production studios and creative professionals. It's a complete business-ready storage solution that incorporate both reliability and security – well done QNAP on another great product.

Click here to find out more.