It’s been a week since I took my QNAP NAS out of the box and powered it up for the very first time. Things weren’t going well at first, but I’m happy to report that the PEBKAC issue has been addressed.

So let’s take a visual tour of the TS-410’s web interface…

Here are the available networking options. I can verify that MS networking (aka Samba), Apple’s AFP and FTP all work without issue. As the files I’m migrating to my NAS are currently on my Mac Pro, I’ve got the QNAP hard-wired to it via Ethernet and connecting via AFP. I’m getting transfer speeds of about 10MBs/second, not bad considering my data is being transcoded from HFS+ to EXT3 on the fly. (see correction in the first comment below)

Once I hook my QNAP up to my Linux rig I plan to access it via NFS, with an eye towards putting it on my wireless network at some point in the future.

Here are the QNAP’s built-in apps. So far I’ve only used the Web File manager, which I’m hoping has a “find and erase” option for all those stupid “DS_Store” files that OS X is dumping on my NAS.

I most certainly won’t have any need for the iTunes service, but it’s nice to know that I could run this very blog from my QNAP if I had to!

There’s also built-in support for surveillance cameras and direct-to-disk download apps like BitTorrent. More functionality can be added via community-contributed QPKG plugins.

Managing my disks seems to be as easy as the grab above would suggest. My 4th 500GB drive is currently booting my Mac Pro, and will be added this weekend when I swap it out for the 250 GB Leopard abomination that I yanked on the day it arrived, and have been storing on a shelf ever since.

I couldn’t resist adding this — a grab from QFinder, the OS X utility that ships with the QNAP. I got this error message while I had a working AFP connection to one of the folders on my QNAP. Check out point #3!

Other thoughts:

Despite having at least one on-board fan my QNAP runs very quietly. The oldskool status lights and shrill beeps are kind of charming in a retro way. And while I don’t currently see any need to physically lock down my hard drives, it’s nice to know that the option is there.

Despite what I wrote at my nadir last week I think the QNAP is a great little unit, capable of a lot more than the 2nd-gen Drobo currently selling for about the same price here in Canada.

To sum up, it’s definitely Linux-compatible. And it’s a keeper!