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With the drives installed, you connect the power and Ethernet cables at the back of the unit and push the power button at the front. The unit will power up the array and the TS-409 will automatically begin its check of the drives.

The 409 Quickly detected the four Seagate 250GB drives we installed and asked us how we wanted to configure the array. You can choose between RAID 0/1/5 and 6. RAID 0 will stripe the data, giving you the full amount of storage on your drives and a performance boost since data can be read off of all the striped drives more quickly. However, if any of the drives fail, you lose everything.

RAID1, mirrors the drives, diving your usable storage in half, but giving you the security of having two copies of your data. RAID 5 gives you 75% of your total storage, using the fourth drive as a parity drive to protect your data. RAID 6 gives you 50% of your total storage, using the third and fourth drive for distributed parity, allowing you to keep working even if a drive fails.

You can also use JBOD, or Just a Bunch of Disks, which will give you four individual drives. This isn’t as fast as striping, and it doesn’t give you the redundancy of mirroring, but you get to keep the maximum storage without risking the loss of ALL your data with a single drive failure.

The QNAP array is not only fast and efficient, but very fault tolerant. We purposely inserted faulty drives into the system and each time the array properly detected the bad drive and allowed us to recover our data. The LED lights at the front of the array let you know if there is a problem with a drive and the array will automatically recover once you hot swap a replacement.

QNAP’s Online RAID Capacity expansion allows you to swap out individual drives in order to up the total storage without having to first copy the array data and then recover it once the new drives are installed.

You can also use QNAP’s Online RAID Level migration to switch between RAID levels as your drive count or your storage needs change.

Perhaps the coolest backup feature of the QNAP is remote replication: with it you can schedule complete or incremental copies of an entire array to a similar QNAP device at a remote location. This is the ultimate in backup redundancy… an easy way to automatically store your important data off site in case of a physical disaster.

As far as service features of the TS-409 are concerned, they included everything that was in the TS209, and then added a few additional tools.

The 409 supports FTP, Secure FTP, CIFS, SMB, AFP, NFS, HTTP, secure HTTP, NTP and Ethernet Gigabit Jumbo Frame. It has integrated support for dynamic web serving, PHP code execution, and sports a native MySQL database for those who want to use the box to host their blog, photo album, or any other popular open-source PHP/MySQL based services. It can integrated with Active directory or you can use the control panel to add up to 1,024 user accounts and 25 shares.

The TS-409 Pro can stream media to your handheld device, or feed content to your network connected media players. There are literally dozens of applications that are just waiting for you to explore.

Like the entire QNAP line, the TS-409 also has native support for Bit Torrent. Of course we know that OUR audience would never use BitTorrent to illegally download copyrighted materials, but at least you’ll be able to automatically torrent the latest edition of Diggnation or Hak5.

However, the coolest addition to the TS-409 has to be its integrated support for surveillance camera feeds. The QNAP Surveillance Station software allows you to use the TS-409 to record the feeds from your IP connected video cameras. Supporting cameras from Axis, Panasonic, Canon, Sony, Mobotix, D-Link, Linksys, and Sanyo, just to name a few, the TS-409 can be configured to be your turnkey video surveillance solution.

The TS-409 Pro is available online now for ~$600 without drives.