Review: QNAP TVS-682T Thunderbolt 2 NAS

How Well Does It Work?

The TVS-682T was created with the video/media professional in mind. The feature that stood out for me from the older QNAP unit I have is the Thunderbolt 2 connections (Figure 2, below). These allow Thunderbolt 2- or Thunderbolt 3 (with an adapter)-equipped computers to use the fast 20GB/sec throughput speed. I have an Akitio T3T Thunderbolt 3-to-2 adapter cable that came in handy--a simple plug-in to the Mac and the TVS-682T. It recognized on the Mac easy as can be. (Akitio did just announce a Thunderbolt 3 docking station to connect legacy peripherals without all the cable clutter from your many devices.)

Figure 2. Connectivity on the RVS-682T’s rear panel

You can also get an adapter from Apple that will connect to all the legacy machines with Thunderbolt 2/1. I don’t have a PC with Thunderbolt but I did recently get my first MacBook Pro, one of the new 2016-generation models that has two Thunderbolt 3 ports standard. I don’t have a PC with Thunderbolt but I did recently get my first MacBook Pro, one of the new 2016-generation models that has two Thunderbolt 3 ports standard. Now any work I do on the Mac, even editing video, can be done right off the NAS if I want at a full 20GB/s bandwidth (more on that later). That transfer rate is plenty fast enough for smooth editing, and much faster than the USB 3 external drives I have been using on my PC laptop.

The Thunderbolt 2 ports are the DAS part of the TVS-682T. The NAS part is accessible via a 1-Gigabit Ethernet, or if you have a computer equipped with a 10-Gigabit Ethernet card you can edit directly via the 10GbE connection on a second computer. The beauty of the TVS-682T is the ability of the NAS to reroute data distribution so both the DAS side and the NAS side get maximum bandwidth meaning you could have two people editing simultaneously right off the unit if needed. The 1GbE connection can still remain dedicated to file sharing via internet as well. That all adds up to an NAS that is not just an NAS, but a full-blown external storage solution for a small studio with multiple editors.

Of course, once it was up and running in a RAID5 configuration for performance and data redundancy, I had to test the bandwidth with the Thunderbolt 2 connection and a few other connections. Also tested were the 1Gbit Ethernet, internal PCIe SSD in the MacBook Pro, and for comparison’s sake, an external USB 3.0 RAID drive from Akitio. It would have been fun to test with a 10Gbit Ethernet connection but I don’t have any systems with a 10Gbit card installed. Table 1 (below) shows what I got on the various tests.

Table 1. Write and read test results.

Based on the tests, the Thunderbolt 2 connection to the TVS-682T does deliver superior performance to most external options I’ve tested. The internal SSD was noticeably faster. The 1Gbit Ethernet connection speed was identical going from the Mac and a PC and those speeds are consistent with what I was seeing when backing up or restoring files from my older TVS 471. Note that when hooked up to the Thunderbolt 2 and the Mac every time the computer went into standby it would take a fair amount of time to reset the connection coming out of sleep mode and it also required a login for the TVS-682T each time. I felt this was a minor annoyance.

Remember that I mentioned editing directly off the NAS earlier? After getting familiar with the unit, I am leaning more toward using the Thunderbolt 2 connection for backing up projects. The speed of the connection should make the process much quicker than the 1Gbit Ethernet. Having to log in each time after coming from sleep mode could get annoying. In a pinch, for a quick edit or to fix of something I have backed up to the NAS, it will be very usable for an edit. I don’t foresee it being my main edit drive. For my PC, it will still be limited to data storage.