After
reading what the TS-470 can do, why did I upgrade it beyond what it ships with?
My main goal is encryption and the QNAP uses the CPU to do
the encryption. At first I was
going to buy the QNAP TS-470 Pro because it had the fastest CPU.
I knew I needed the fastest CPU because if the CPU is being used to do
the encryption then it isn’t too free to do other things and depending on the
amount of write traffic it may be the main bottle neck in performance.
(See my stats here to where I proved
this). After reading through the QNAP
forums I read that people were upgrading to the Intel 3770T and it had onboard
AES encryption/decryption which offloaded the traffic from the CPU and it had 4
cores. I thought this would give me the
best chance at disk i/o performance.
Here is the CPU I bought:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B008ACVF9A/ref=oh_details_o00_s00_i00?ie=UTF8&psc=1
Additionally, that chip uses 10 watts less of energy over
the TS-470 Pro model which means it will run cooler than the CPU in the TS-470
Pro (55 Watts chip). Therefore my
#1 and #3 requirements are being met with better hardware.
Additionally, with the extra cores that are free, as I add apps I have
the horsepower to run them.
While I had the case open to replace the CPU I went ahead
and put in the full amount of RAM even though I will probably never use it all.
Being that it was only $150 for the RAM in comparison to the price of the
QNAP TS-470 at about $1,000 plus the cost of the hard drives or SSD’s in this
case, adding $150 to the cost was nothing and it is much easier to put the DIMMS
in while you have everything torn apart.
I used Kingston ValueRAM 16GB Kit (2x8GB) 1600MHz DDR3 PC3-12800 Non-ECC
CL11 SODIMM Notebook Memory KVR16S11K2/16 and I bought it from Amazon here:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B008TYIEVQ/ref=oh_details_o04_s00_i00?ie=UTF8&psc=1
The price will fluctuate on this ram.
One day it is $140 another day it is $180 today as I write this, it is
$160.
For the same price as a QNAP TS-470 Pro I was able to buy
an upgraded CPU and the QNAP TS-470 box.
My QNAP TS-470 Ultimate box, as some have dubbed these upgrades, does a
much better job of encrypting while keeping the cpu’s available for other tasks
and runs cooler which means it runs quieter.
I bought two QNAP TS-470’s with all of the upgrade
components. I did one upgrade which
went well except I tore down too many components and then during the second
upgrade which I documented here, I was
much more efficient with the upgrade and only tore down the things I needed too.
Both boxes are running great.
I also did data validation between the upgrades where I had a high end
workstation on a dedicated switch connected to a stock QNAP TS-470 and my
upgraded QNAP TS-470 Ultimate and ran the exact same tests one after another to
see how the performance upgrade improved things.
You can see my results here.
GO TO:
Why did I upgrade?
GOTO:
You can see the
testing I did before I did the upgrade here