Introduction

We would like to thank QNAP for supplying the review sample.



The TVS-682T, a high-end NAS from QNAP, a leading company for NAS products, features very strong hardware. Including a Skylake Intel CPU and two Thunderbolt 2 ports, it is capable of transfer speeds of up to 20 Gbps and, as such, support for smooth 4K video transfers to Macs with such ports. The TVS-682T actually comes with several networking features, including a pair of 10 Gbit (10GBase-T) ports, four GbE ports with support for teaming (Link Aggregation), and ultra-fast Thunderbolt ports. QNAP even armed this system with great multimedia capabilities. There are three HDMI ports, a number of audio ports, and two built-in speakers, and a remote control is included in the bundle.

The TVS-682T's main feature is its support for all popular storage types since it can hold four HDDs, two SSDs, and a pair of M.2 disks. Because of its increased network transfer speeds due to its 10 Gbit and Thunderbolt 2 ports, QNAP had to include the possibility of fast storage in order to eliminate any bottlenecks. Another interesting aspect of the TVS-682T is its support for QNAP's Qtier technology, which automatically moves hot data to high-performance storage tiers and cold data to lower-cost, higher-capacity drives. Qtier is essential in NAS servers featuring both fast and slow storage media solutions since fast drives would otherwise not be able to significantly boost performance if most of the data were stored on the slower, mechanical drives. According to QNAP, the Qtier technology is able to identify frequently accessed hot data to move its corresponding data blocks to a higher storage tier (e.g. from the HDD RAID group to the SSD RAID group), while the opposite applies to lower-weight data blocks. Such data migration can be stopped by the system's administrator if other administrative tasks have to be performed or there is a need for increased bandwidth. Qtier not only ensures high performance were it's due but results in significant cost savings since a NAS doesn't have to exclusively use SSD drives for maximum performance. Optimal storage efficiency is also achieved since a scheduler can be used to deactivate auto-tiering during peak utilization periods, and the administrator has access to auto-tiering statistics in order to check on the NAS server's high- and low-weight data archives.