QNAP Adds Two Core i3 Desktop NASes

[beq]

Interested to see how these new Core i3-2120 (dual-core 3.3 GHz) NASes compare to older Core 2 Duo 2.8 GHz predecessors. And how they compare to all the cheaper D525 Atom (dual-core 1.8 GHz) models.

Personally I was looking at the 6-bay QNAP TS-659 Pro II (D525 Atom, USB 3.0, SATA 6Gb/s) for $1300.

Whereas the 8-bay QNAP TS-879 Pro is $2200 with Core i3, 2GB RAM, and upgradeability to 10GbE.

Is the performance boost really that significant, and does it only come into play in specific use cases such as full disk encryption, multiple virtual disks, SSDs, etc?

 

[Generic George]

Interested to see how these new Core i3-2120 (dual-core 3.3 GHz) NASes compare to older Core 2 Duo 2.8 GHz predecessors. And how they compare to all the cheaper D525 Atom (dual-core 1.8 GHz) models.

Personally I was looking at the 6-bay QNAP TS-659 Pro II (D525 Atom, USB 3.0, SATA 6Gb/s) for $1300.

Whereas the 8-bay QNAP TS-879 Pro is $2200 with Core i3, 2GB RAM, and upgradeability to 10GbE.

Is the performance boost really that significant, and does it only come into play in specific use cases such as full disk encryption, multiple virtual disks, SSDs, etc?

With regards to the processing power I think basically it comes down to two things.

1) What else are you going to ask of it. You can run programs on a lot of these nas for things like media servers.

Video transcoding (converting on the fly from one type of video say AVI to MP4 or something like that) in particular is something I've seen mentioned as being beyond the capabilities of most atom or SOC based NAS, but I would expect a i3 to be able to do it quite handily. I'd expect there are other software packages that you can run on the nas which would likewise exceed the abilities of an atom chip to satisfy.

2) How much is the NAS going to get hammered in terms of # of machines accessing it and the throughput demanded. The more machines you have on it the more demands that are going to be placed on the NAS. Now I suspect that in most cases you'll be saturating the ethernet long before you'll saturate the processing power, but it is conceivable that this might not be the case.

I'd suspect in most highly demanding situations that the 10gb Ethernet is likely to prove more of an asset than the increased processing power, since with iSCSI taget drives and the central storage a NAS generally functions as, it's a LOT easier to saturate the gigabit ethernet connection than it is to tap out the processing power.

 

[00Roush]

Is the performance boost really that significant, and does it only come into play in specific use cases such as full disk encryption, multiple virtual disks, SSDs, etc?

Yes the performance boost can be huge between an Atom based NAS and a i3 based NAS. Based on the little bit of info I have found an Atom based NAS has a max throughput of less than 200 MB/sec. It just doesn't have enough processing power to push more data than that over the network. Whereas the i3 based units can provide 1000 MB/sec or more of total throughput. This is strictly just network traffic and not even counting the processing power needed for software RAID. With RAID 5/6 and a very busy NAS the gap between the two platforms could be much larger.

In the end though this only matters if you need the extra processing power and higher throughput. As Generic George pointed out an Atom based NAS is capable of saturating a single gigabit connection with a bit of processing power to spare. So with a single gigabit connection you would probably only notice a performance difference if the NAS was very busy and had lots of clients hitting it at the same time. Now once you start to move to dual gigabit NICs, 10 GbE, and/or full disk encryption the Atom CPU starts to become a bottleneck. So in those situations the extra processing power of the i3 CPU can offer much higher performance especially with 10 GbE.

00Roush