First Impressions (Exterior)


With its metallic grey body and its imposing black plastic swing door the 409 looks like it belongs in a server room….or a tax audit. Gone is the fun-loving shiny plastic front cover found on previous 2 bay models which made those particular NAS boxes more appropriate for the home office use rather than the utilitarian small / medium business end of the market. More importantly the somber all business vibe the 409 Pro Turbo gives off would certainly give any server admin a lasting good first impression. Honestly, this NAS looks a lot more like a small server than a home appliance; maybe it is the new door, maybe it is just its increased size, either way this unit looks like it would be more at home in a server farm than a country farm.


The 409 Pro Turbo’s plastic door is held in place with 6 plastic clips that are very similar to the ones found on many computer cases. As with many computer cases this front door easily pops off with some gentle persuasion; QNAP did miss an opportunity by not including a cloth dust filter for this door as the mesh will let a lot of dust in at it is now. While this makes cleaning out the unit easy, just cleaning a dust filter would have been easier. However, its main goal is to give you fast, easy access to the hard drives and in this it does excel. The door itself is held in position with friction and only requires minor force to swing it open. This is a much better design that the previous model with its 4 retaining screws.


Not everything on the front has been redesigned; QNAP’s engineers did not throw the baby out with the bath water when they sat down to design the 409. This model -just as with its two bay predecessor the 209 Pro- has numerous information LED’s prominently displayed along the bottom front edge of the NAS. From right to left you have the a Blue LED for USB activity, then there is a general “error led” that only goes on if there is an error with the unit or during one of its operations (say trying to copy 320GB of data via the USB function when only 310GB is free on the NAS). The next four LEDs represent the hard drives and show hard drive activity and then you have a network led that show not only network connectivity but network access as well. The final led is actually built into the power button and glows when the unit is on.

Unlike previous QNAP models these informative LEDs do not make it very easy to see what the status of the NAS is with just a quick glance. The 409’s information LEDS are approximately half the size of previous models and they are very difficult to see even when sitting next to the unit, let alone from across a well lighted room. Of course, these LEDS are really only a secondary means of discovering what is happening with the NAS since this model expects you to use the administration page to obtain the necessary information. As a nice touch if something major does occur (like a hard drive failing) not only will the small unobtrusive information LED change from solid green to a blinking red, this NAS will alert you with an audible buzzer-like noise and can even send you an email alert to two different email addresses. This certainly will get your attention a lot quicker than just a simple red fail light.

The front of the unit is not only for information but it is also where the power switch, a USB port and another mysterious button is located. The power switch is pretty much self evident and is backed up by a loud beeping noise when the unit is powering up and down.

The USB Copy Button

What is not self evident is the purpose of the other button, located at the left end of the information bar. This button is the USB copy button and it’s a very impressive feature; one simply has to plug in any USB storage device into the front of the NAS and with a press of that button the complete contents will be copied to the NAS. It does not matter if the USB deice is a 2GB thumb drive or a 320GB external USB enclosure. As long as there is enough room available on the NAS it will faithfully copy it all.

If QNAP had left it at that, this feature would have been impressive but being the innovators that they take pride in being, they took it to the next level. If your camera (or any USB device for that matter) supports the USB mass storage device specification this NAS will copy the information on it. This adds a whole extra dimension to its “media server” and “iTunes server” features and makes this USB copy option not only impressive but damn impressive.


Also on a positive note the 409 has four large rubber feet on the bottom of it which gives it a sure footedness that is always welcome in such an expensive appliance. It also has the added benefit of reinforcing the idea that this unit can only be mounted in an upright orientation. Any other mounting orientation will lead to air flow degradation and/or make the units “hot swap ability” even that much more difficult.


Just as the front is for information display, the back is where the LAN port, two more USB ports, power connector, reset button and even a 92mm exhaust fan is located. This is a very well executed layout with everything clearly labeled and does not feel cramped or cluttered. If for whatever reason you to forget the admin password or inoccrectly setup a network setting, by simply pressing in the recessed “reset” button the NAS will go back to its default factory setting. This is a great idea and it does work extremely well; however not everything is as well thought out as this reset option.

Where this unit is designed and marketed towards the Small/Medium Business end of the marketplace it would have been nice if QNAP had not only provided a 2nd 10/100/1000 LAN port but also the ability to do Network Teaming for enhanced fault tolerance and load balancing. After all, if you are designing a NAS for this market you have to design it to efficiently handle multiple simultaneous data requests that could easily overload a single 125MB/s “gigabit” connection. As an added benefit this would have added some much-needed fault tolerance since as it stands right now the most disastrous point of failure (next to a chipset or PCB failure) is that single network connector. Even if QNAP is unable to engineer in true network teaming (maybe it is a limitation of custom Linux kernel they are using) they could have easily added in a 2nd LAN port whose only job is to become active if the first port fails. This would certainly keep the NAS up and running and if done properly would be completely transparent to it users. While this oversight is disappointing, this is QNAP’s first true foray into the S/MB end of the business marketplace and I would not be surprised to find this is corrected on future models.

On the positive side, the case itself is made entirely of thick preformed aluminum (with the only exception being the front black plastic door) that is more than durable enough to take even the harshest of abuse. While the fit and finish has also been vastly improved over previous model it still is not up to the standards of a custom built NAS, but for a mass-produced item is a very good job. QNAP’s QA group must certainly have high standards indeed.

Yes, this is an expensive unit and to see anything less than near perfection in its design execution would be disappointing but a unit’s cost is not always the best way to judge its value (just look at the price of some Apple computers for example) and with the 409 the old adage “you get what you pay for” is spot on. With the obviously high quality engineering that went into this unit one would could certainly be forgiven for comparing it favorably to much more expensive, yet similarly equipped, NAS’s.