01 June 2018
QNAP Systems has released the TVS-x73e series of NAS units aimed at small business users.
Housed in what the vendor claims is a state-of-the-art metal design, the line-up includes the four-bay TVS-473e, six-bay TVS-673e, and eight-bay TVS-873e. QNAP says each one is powered by a high-performance and energy-efficient AMD RX-421BD quad-core 2.1 GHz APU (Turbo Core up to 3.4 GHz) processor and 4/8GB DDR4 RAM (up to 64GB).
With an optional 10GbE NIC installed, the units are said to deliver up to 1139MBps throughput and up to 1091MBs with the AES-NI hardware-accelerated encryption engine.
With SSD caching and two built-in M.2 SSD slots, QNAP says the TVS-x73e series can benefit from its Qtier technology to optimise storage efficiency across M.2 SSDs, 2.5-inch SSDs and high-capacity HDDs for balanced cost, performance, and capacity.
It adds that the units include two PCIe slots that allow greater system flexibility.
For instance, users can install an optional 10GbE network card for boosting virtualisation and high-resolution video editing and sharing; a USB 3.1 Gen.2 (10Gbps) card for transferring large media files to/from USB storage; or QNAP's QM2 cards that allow for adding up to two M.2 SSDs to configure SSD caching, or to create a RAID 5 tiered storage along with the two M.2 SSDs in the NAS (M.2 SSD sold separately) to increase data protection.
There are also QM2 cards that include 10GbE 10GBASE-T connectivity to provide SSD caching with high-speed network connectivity on a single card.