The QNAP TS-569 Pro is a richly featured NAS that will easily handle all tasks of a small to medium business environment well, so its price is, naturally, on the high side. You do, on top of that, get QNAP's top notch support and a marvelous operating system that makes even difficult tasks easy to accomplish for anyone with basic networking experience. Since NAS servers like this one will most likely be the favorite choice of enthusiast users, QNAP decided to utilize the existing HDMI port through the HD Station package. The latter installs Google's Chrome browser, a YouTube browser, and the most popular media center application offering a ton of features: XBMC. Along with QNAP's remote or Qremote application running on a smartphone, the TS-569 Pro is transformed into a standalone media player that can easily play even the highest bitrate videos. Its only drawback is the lack of any audio ports due to the unit being designed as a NAS. Its HDMI port doesn't, to make things worse, support audio pass-through, which results in nothing but measly two-channel audio capability. This problem is, unfortunately, difficult to overcome. QNAP has to wait for Intel to enable HD audio pass-through on the Atom CPU. Thankfully, there is something on the road map, but no specific dates have been given.

Moving on to transfer rate speeds: The TS-569 Pro performs exceptionally well, easily keeping up with the competition, even if compared to higher-end models like the TS-669 Pro I have reviewed in the past. If you have an Ethernet switch that supports the Link Aggregation Control Protocol (LACP), you should definitely take advantage of both Gigabit NICs for highly increased transfer speeds. You should be careful with the selection of the HDDs you will install into the NAS, but QNAP thankfully provides an HDD compatibility list. You should also take a look at QNAP's forum, where you will find an incredible volume of useful information on this and other matters.

To wrap up, the TS-569 Pro is another excellent product from QNAP, with high performance, a ton of features/capabilities, and amazing build quality. Exploiting the HDMI port through the HD Station package rounds the TS-569 out well since the package, besides the multimedia features that it generously provides, also enables SMB administrators to access and control the NAS locally when needed.