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This review first appeared in issue 356 of PC Pro.

Representing the entry point of Qsan’s new NAS appliance family, the XCubeNAS XN5104R offers SMBs a small footprint storage solution with plenty of room to grow. This competitively priced 1U rack NAS presents four hot-swap LFF/SFF SATA drive bays at the front, secretes a pair of NVMe SSD slots inside and teams them up with four 2.5GbE multi-gigabit ports.

A quad-core 2.3GHz Intel Xeon D-1714 CPU sits in the driving seat and is partnered by 8GB of DDR4 which can be expanded hugely to 256GB. There’s room for more network ports, as the spare PCI-E Gen4 slot accepts Qsan’s dual-port 10GbE and 25GbE cards.

A compelling feature of Qsan’s NAS appliances is their enormous expansion potential, and the XN5104R is no exception. Fit Qsan’s SAS3 PCI-E card and you can daisy-chain a mix of external disk shelves for a total of 414 drives and a maximum raw capacity of 9PB.

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Full view of the Qsan XCubeNAS XN5104R — **It may have a small footprint, but the XCubeNAS has huge potential** (Image credit: Future)

For deployment, we loaded four 22TB Western Digital Red Pro NAS drives and used the XFinder app to discover the appliance and install the latest QSM software. From the custom setup option, we created a big RAID5 storage pool and, if you install NVMe SSDs, you can assign one or both to a pool as a hybrid cache, which accelerates both read and write operations.

QSM offers plenty of storage management and data integrity features. The ZFS-based OS includes copy-on-write snapshots for NAS shares and iSCSI LUNs, in-line data deduplication, intelligent real-time data tiering and facilities for applying one of three WORM (write once read many) policies to NAS share data. You can use a policy to guarantee nothing already in a share can be modified, set it so that only new files copied to the share have the retention date applied, or stop anything from ever being modified or deleted by applying a WORM forever policy.

The QSM web console is easy to navigate but apps are in short supply, with Qsan only including ones for file and media management, hardware monitoring, antivirus, backup and cloud syncing. It used to offer VPN, SQL database, web services and hypervisor manager apps, but these were dropped from QSM a while ago.

The apps Qsan does provide are easy to use, however. The Backup app manages snapshot scheduling and can secure appliance data to any Rsync-compliant remote appliance, as well as Amazon S3, Alibaba OSS and HiCloud S3 cloud accounts. It can replicate folders between XCubeNAS appliances using the Xmirror service, while the Cloud Sync app handles one-way and two-way sync jobs with Dropbox, OneDrive and Google Drive.

Qsan XCubeNAS XN5104R's featured XInsight web server — **The XN5104R can be remotely managed using Qsan’s XInsight web server** (Image credit: Future)

Qsan fans will like the free XInsight app, which offers central management for all their AFA, NAS and SAN appliances. Run as a web service on any Windows host, its web console provides an overview of all activity, storage usage and alert notifications plus quick access to each appliance’s management console.

Performance over 2.5GbE is good.

A share mapped to a Dell PowerEdge R760xs Windows Server 2022 host returned 2.3Gbits/sec and 2.2Gbits/sec for both Iometer sequential and random read and write tests, and the XN5104R delivered identical results in our 2.5GbE IP SAN tests. For the latter, we increased the pressure with a dual 2.5GbE MPIO link to our 1TB iSCSI target and recorded sequential reads and writes of 4.6Gbits/sec and 4.2Gbits/sec, while random operations held firm at 4.6Gbits/sec and 4Gbits/sec.

SMBs looking for a good-value rack NAS appliance with an enormous potential for capacity expansion will find a lot to like about Qsan’s XCubeNAS XN5104R.

It’s light on apps but big on 2.5GbE performance, and Qsan’s QSM software delivers great data integrity and storage management features.

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Probably the most respected tester of IT equipment in the UK, if you’ve bought a piece of kit for the office - whether printer, server or rack appliance - then you’ve probably read Dave’s verdict at some point along the way.

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