QNAP's new NASbook has both Thunderbolt 4 and network connectivity
Malcolm Owen
QNAP has introduced its Thunderbolt 4 All-Flash NASbook, a high-density storage device aimed at video production that can provide high-speed transfers to connected Macs.
Firmly aimed at streamlining video production in pre-production and post-production, the QNAP Thunderbolt 4 All-Flash NASbook is an M.2 SSD device meant to hold fast storage drives, as well as delivering the data to users as quickly as possible.
Measuring 8.46 inches by 7.83 inches by 2.36 inches, the NASbook is a very small storage appliance. At 4.94 pounds, it's also reasonably portable for a dedicated storage device, meaning it could be brought to filming locations instead of being kept in an office.
Capable of holding five E1S/M.2 PCIe NVMe SSDs, the unit offers automatic RAID disk replacement, so SSDs can be replaced without any system downtime. It also uses 13th-gen Intel Core hybrid architecture 8-core, 12-thread or 12-core, 16-thread processors for dealing with video production tasks, while the built-in GPU can help accelerate video transcoding.
On the connectivity side, it has two Thunderbolt 4 ports to connect to Mac and PC workstations, while 2.5GbE and 10GbE ports can be used for more conventional network-based NAS usage. A pair of USB 3.2 Gen 2 10Gbps ports can deal with ingesting video from other storage, or for connecting a DAS or JBOD for archiving projects.
The included HDMI port allows teams to display raw footage stored on the NASbook on an external display at up to 4K resolution.
The entire unit runs on the ZFS-based QuTS hero operating system, which has self-healing properties to detect and repair corrupted data in RAW images.
The QNAP Thunderbol 4 All-Flash NASbook starts from $1,199 for the 8-core version, $1,449 for the 12-core model, and are available now.
As part of a launch offer, a free one-year 1TB allocation of myQNAPcloud cloud storage is being provided to early buyers from QNAP's website.
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1 Comment
One important caveat on products like this (I found this out the hard way on an earlier generation) is that any cloud backup solution that will back up a RAID, but not a NAS (Backblaze is one, I suspect the same restriction applies to many others) considers these things to be NASes. So does any piece of software that doesn't like network drives - even when you're connected to the Thunderbolt port, it's considered a network drive.
It's not really a Thunderbolt/NAS hybrid drive - it's a straight-up NAS that issuing Thunderbolt's ability to serve as a fast network interface - but it's a NAS from a management and software standpoint, and that's important to realize...