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Storage you can see, clouds you create

QNAP TS-421

QNAP has an almost cult-like following in the NAS world and for good reason too, it has always delivered solid products with capabilities that often put higher priced units to shame.

What has stopped me drinking the Kool-Aid in the past though was an aversion to QNAP's interface design. Purists will likely shun me for preferring the new QTS 4.0 interface with its widgets and shiny graphics, but it is absolutely far more intuitive and much easier to use.

It's not just a pretty face with QTS 4.0 either, QNAP's App Centre is among the most populous of all and rivals even the extensive library that Synology has to offer.

Some things haven't changed though. The TS-421 is one of the few units out there to still feature eSATA, so think wisely if that's on your wish list. Also uncommon on comparable offerings is the inclusion of a Marvell CPU when most others are now running an Intel variant of some description.

Some of the home screen offerings

Admittedly the TS-421's Marvell chip is clocked a 2.0GHZ and coupled with 1GB of DDR3, so it does feel quick and responsive to use through the web interface. Disappointingly though, this snappiness didn't shine through quite so much in the benchmarks.

Apps abound

It's not the slowest contender here, but with write speeds peaking in the low-to-mid 60MB/s range and reads spread around 40 to 50MB/s it isn't winning any races. Evidently, QNAP is doing well keeping up on the software front, but for the money there is much better hardware out there than the TS-421.

Price £390 (unpopulated)
More info QNAP

Seagate NAS Pro

Seagate's NAS Pro line gets top marks for style in terms of both hardware and software. While most NAS boxes are nothing more than another utility box with blinking lights to be shoved in a cupboard, Seagate has gone to the trouble of making something you'd actually be proud to have sitting on your desk.

The clean design language doesn't just end with the glossy piano-black frontage either, much like Netgear, Seagate have opted for a concise no-nonsense approach to the web interface which makes for a very pleasant and intuitive user experience.

Home screen

Unlike Netgear, however, Seagate's App Manager has a very limited choice of additional software. At the moment there's a menu consisting of just five apps; Seagate Antivirus, BitTorrent Sync, Surveillance Manager, Wordpress and ownCloud. All together it’s not that surprising as the NAS Pro line has only been on the shelf a couple of months and Seagate has promised that there will be more on the way in the near future.

With its 1.7GHz of dual-core Intel goodness and 2GB of DDR3 onboard, there is one area that the NAS Pro really tops the charts; write performance. With a 108MB/s sequential write speed that is only match by the might of Synology and a blistering 100MB/s random write that just edges out the Terrastation it's certainly not hanging around.

Available apps will surely increase over time

On the other hand though, I was only able to clock read speeds up to 62 MB/s which is a bit of a letdown considering the write performance. The hardware is definitely capable of handling the throughput, so perhaps this is something that might be addressed in a software update. As a new entry, Seagate’s NAS Pro is well polished all-round and doesn’t skimp on the hardware. Indeed, it will only get better as the number of apps available grows.

Price £360 (unpopulated)
More info Seagate