NAS Set Up And Web Interface Video

The following footage shows the setup procedure of the XN3002T and also covers its operating system.


QSAN Storage Manager (QSM) looks nice, but still has a long way to go until it reaches the functionality of QNAP's and Synology's offerings. Like its competitors, it is based on a Linux kernel and uses the ZFS (Zeta-byte File System) filesystem which, among others, provides extensive protection against data corruption. If you want to read more about ZFS, take a look at QSAN's site and, more specifically, their article "ZFS vs. EXT4".

ZFS looks to be a nice fit for storage servers. However, it isn't perfect. Its main problem is that once you build a ZFS volume, it is difficult to increase its size. It is not as easy as with other filesystems (EXT4, for example) where you just add a drive and upgrade the RAID's storage. You also cannot reduce a ZFS pool or change the data protection type without rebuilding it. However, ZFS only rebuilds data, while legacy RAID configurations rebuild everything on a drive, which takes much longer. In other words, with legacy RAID, rebuild times depend on the size of the drive you want to rebuild instead of the total number of drives in the array and the data stored on this array.

The main problem of QSM is the small number of compatible applications, especially for multimedia and surveillance purposes, of which there are many in other NAS operating systems. The system also seems to have a tough time handling heavy network transfers since we noticed high CPU and RAM utilization, which also had the system slow down and feel sluggish.

We didn't the following:

• There is no option to resize windows, which is weird for a modern OS.
• The "Welcome to QSM" guide can't be deactivated on the first screen.
• Shared folder permissions are complex, which will probably confuse novice users.
• There is no option to only encrypt a folder; you have to encrypt the whole array at the start.
• We ran into a problem once we tried to initialize or erase the pool. The whole system got stuck, and we had to physically remove the HDDs and erase them on a PC.

QSM needs lots of work to reach the functionality of DSM (Synology) and QTS (QNAP), and its application ecosystem is small compared to DSM or QTS. The lack of multimedia and surveillance applications makes it very hard for a home-centric NAS such as this one to compete with such strong competitors. Hopefully, QSAN will address these issues in time, and QSAN will hopefully be be able to attract programmers to develop applications for its OS.