QNAP TS-101 TurboStation

QNAP TS-101

In cooperation with Steven de Feij

Storage: one always seems to run out of it. Ofcourse this problem can be solved easily by putting another hard drive in your PC or using an external drive, but in some occasions using a network disk might be the best solution. In this review we take a closer look at the QNAP TS-101 TurboStation.

On first sight this drive looks like just another external hard disk, but a few additional leds and the larger amount of connections make it obvious that the TurboStation actually is a NAS (Network Attached Storage). The TS-101 is supplied without a hard disk, so you will have to assemble one yourself. This however can be done within a few minutes: assembling the SATA-disk, closing the housing, tracing the built-in web interface and logging in. Easy as that.

For this review we decided to use the Hitachi Deskstar 7K500 500 GB SATA II hard disk. Installing the drive did not give any problems at all and within a few minutes we were able to log in to the config screen. After formatting the disk we were ready to take a closer look at the features of the QNAP. Besides acting as a fileserver the TurboStations also can be used as printserver, photo album or dynamic webserver. In fact you can spend hours and hours on discovering and trying out all features this drives offers.

Ofcourse the fairly simple processor, 64MB internal and 16MB flash memory do not guarantee the NAS to act as an extreme powerfull webserver, so you will not be able to host a gigantic website from the drive. But for hosting a simple home website the device will do a pretty good job.