I am very sorry, but new entries can no longer be accepted

Well my friends,

today starts a 5-day period in which you can enter a contest to win a brand new “Lenovo M90z all-in-one Multitouch Windows 7 PC“. I have been given the opportunity by Lenovo/Intel via Ivy Worldwide (along with a list of other Phase II participants) to review such a unit, and now we all have another unit standing by, ready to be shipped to the contest price winners.

Who can enter?

We are all free in how we set up our contest, and believe me, we all have very different motivations and drawings. I have been included in the review crowd partly because I have a son with certain disabilities. He is slow in development and has been diagnosed with a form of autism. He cannot read or write and has limited (fine) motor skills. In his school, the therapists have limited access to a touch screen computer to help in his development through custom software programs tailored specifically to “mentally of physically challenged  kids”. These touch screen programs have been very successful in helping development and he can now navigate a computer without a mouse, just by touch screen, very well.

Due to the possibilities this Lenovo unit offers to special schools for disabled children as well as for home situations in which a family has the care over a “mentally of physically challenged child” I have decided try to help them out and therefore limit this contest to this specific audience. So if you represent a school for disabled children or a family with care for a “mentally of physically challenged child” you should enter.

What is expected of you?

I would like you to tell me in an elaborate way how you would use the Lenovo unit in your school or family. Just two lines will not be sufficient, because you really need to convince me that this Lenovo unit would enrich your the school experience or family life. I will be studying all entries and will make a decision on who wins the contest based on their motivation.
You can enter by posting a comment (please login or sign-up to do so, so I also have your email address to get in touch with you in case you win) or drop me a note at “lenovo at iljacoolen dot nl”.
All email entries will be posted in the comments by me.

You are free to include videos or photos in the entry. Just enter the hyperlinks and I will embed them in the approved posts.
I do preserve the right to do some final moderation over the entry to make sure all entries are legally valid and no offending language is present, before publishing it on the site, so you might not see your entry right away. But rest assured, I will be quick on this.

• Entries committed beyond April 19th are too late and will not be included.
• The winner will be announced soon after April 19th. How soon depends on the number of entries I have to judge.
• If you are a Dutch reader, you can post your entry in Dutch as I will be judging on content, not language, but English would be better for most of my readers.

Lenovo M90z Specs

Below you will find a list of other Phase II promotion participants. All have a contest of their own, all on separate dates. Make sure you check them out.
Lenovo M90z Participants

Heads-up everybody.
As you might have read in one of my earlier posts, I have received an evaluation unit from Lenovo/Intel. 

Now, me and 25 others in the same evaluation batch have been given word that in the next few weeks we all get a change to give away the same unit to a lucky price winner.

We can make up our own type of contest with our own requirements. Each evaluation participant will have a 5-day window in which site visitors can enter the drawing.

So, stay tuned, as it will be my turn from April 15th to April 19th. I will be posting the schedule for the whole evaluation group as well as how to enter the drawing on the 15th

Looking forward to your entries and participation.

In the meantime, follow the twitter search feed on the M90z which will also show the other participants.

Last year HDS had a Blogger Day in Japan. This must have been a good experience for HDS to have another event like this planned on March 23rd and 24th.

Usually, blogger events are tough on the presenters and their respective companies, because analysts and bloggers tend to ask questions usually not asked by prospects, although prospects should also be asking these questions. HDS already had an event like the HDS Bloggers Day 2011, so they know what to expect. I guess HDS will be very prepared for the attending crowd’s avalanche of questions.

The attending delegation of bloggers is quite impressive, and like I tweeted a couple of days back, I do feel honored to be mentioned among them.
If you at all care about the storage industry, you should be reading their blogs, and certainly follow them on twitter if you don’t do so already.

Below is the list of attendees in random order.

Make sure you follow the tweets using the twitter hashtag #HDSday and keep updated throug http://www.hds.com/go/geekday/

Looing forward to it….

Tomorrow I will be attending the HDS 2011 Geek / Blogger Day. In light of this event and the recent Calvin Zito (@HPStorageGuy) post on the HP APEX features I had some thought on this.

We all know HP OEM’s the HDS VSP product, as they did (still do actually) for the XP (HDS USP) series. In the third quarter of last year, HDS announced the new VSP product line, instantaneously followed by HP and the P9500. HP is differentiating itself from HDS by having some additional features that are not available from HDS.

The HP Application Performance Extender (APEX) enables certain host operating systems (currently Linux, Windows and HP-UX) to prioritize their host I/O over other systems. This enables IT departments to set performance characteristics to their core applications to ensure the optimum services to their (internal) customers.

In the post by Calvin Zito I mentioned at the beginning, you can read the APEX software now also allows for LDEV ownership transfer to a less busy controller in the P9500. This way you can also optimize the array usage without depending on APEX host agents.

For this to work properly, you might want to make sure you do not set conflicting values for the APEX host agents and the settings for DLOM. My question, will the DLOM micro-processor ownership changes also change preferred LUN/ALUA settings in respect to the host, if they notice it at all? I believe not all native host MPIO drivers like this while being actively used.

Anyway, one of my questions for the HDS Geek Day will be whether HDS thinks an APEX type feature is not needed at all, or if they are working on a similar feature to be used by the VSP.

Since a few days (as of March 10th), Sony has a new PS3 firmware available. Version 3.60 to be exact.

As of this version, you can copy a number of your savegames, not all,  to your PlayStation^tm Network (Plus only) account. This way you can download all your “cloud stored” savegames to another PS3 console (with the same firmware obviously) and resume your gaming there. Be sure to copy them to the cloud again after you’re done gaming.

Note, it is a manual process. You have to navigate the crossbar menu to the Games options and then copy the savegames to your PlayStation^tm Network account.

I have been trying to figure out if I have a Plus account or not, but so far, all I got from the PlayStation^tm Network Plus site is a 404 error. It is also really annoying to navigate the website because it is cluttered with banners and game info, and to me it far from informational. I have been trying the website out since I got my PS3 a couple of years back, but it hasn’t improved much over time.

I do think it is a good move to enable “online” storing of your save games, but is it what we need? I think not. The Nintendo Wii did a better job I guess, by enabling you to store your game info on one of the controllers and bring that along to your friends place or wherever.
The problem to me is that it still is a manual process. Sony should make it an automatic synchronization (maybe a la Dropbox) feature you can enable in the settings menu.

The 150MB online storage space isn’t much, but it is more than enough to store a bunch of savegame data. Game progress information is only small in size. Sony has limited the online storage to 150MB or 1000 files, which seems like more then enough for me, but I couldn’t hardly determine the required space for hardcore gamers (which I am not).

Sony’s move is displaying a trend though. A lot more devices and not limited to game consoles or personal computers, are moving towards the online storing, or storing in the cloud if you wish.
My home cinema soundbar (HTS9140) has upgradable firmware (it is Busybox Linux under the hood), and it is quite possible that future releases enable me to save or read cloud saved configuration data. Heck,  I could even make this feature myself, because Philips offers the source code on request.

But for what purpose would I want all my consumer electronics connected to and storing in the cloud? We can all think of a number of things, like a real-time fridge inventory for my friendly neighborhood grocery store, so he or she can deliver new beer if my fridge tells him or her my stash has dried up.  I’d rather have  my frensh-fry cooker tell me on my PlayStation mid-game that the fries are done, or maybe even force a pause mid-game  to prevent a fire in the kitchen. Not speaking from experience here by the way !!  Will it come to that? Who knows…. it will only depend on the demand we can all generate.

I suspect most cloud-stored consumer electronics information will be vendor controlled and mined and might not interact with other devices in the same home, unless they are from the same vendor.
As a data center technology guy I have encountered numerous compatibility issues. This might all become true for home electronics as well if we don’t set the demands and requirements from a consumer standpoint instead of  vendors perspective.

I am really looking forward to what is yet to be invented…

I have been working with a BlueArc NAS head for some time and just recently the requirement for NFSv4 and ACL’s had come up.

For a while I have been looking for some more info on how the NFS usermapping and ACL’s works, and especially for NFSv4. We were looking for a solution to the problem where the mapping of the Unix usernames and userid’s did not align with the NFS Server’s configuration, although we could not determine why.  When the user id and usernames cannot be matched with the NFS server, the active users credentials are squashed to anonymous. That makes it hard to enforce some decent ACL policies. The NFS client log clearly stated that it could not map a user to a domain.

Feb 25 14:24:26 nfsclient rpc.idmapd[30316]: nss_getpwnam: name 'username' does not map into domain 'domainname'

It was clear the usermapping differs between NFS3 and NFS4, but I did not quickly find what the difference was. The vendor’s administration guide wasn’t very elaborate on this topic, so I reverted to the beloved Google searches to try my luck. Unfortunately most hits were related to a bug in libnfsidmap.so in utils-nfs-lib which was supposed to be solved in versions which seem old to this time. So that could not be the cure to my issue. I accidentally stumbled across the solution by reading the command line man pages for the NAS head. It is just another example of an administration guide or command reference that is not as elaborate or at all complete as the man pages supplied with the management interfaces supplied by vendors. This BlueArc example isn’t on its own here.

The NFS server config wasn’t like the NFS clients configuration, because the NFS server was a NAS head. The NFS client uses the idmapd to match unix names with unix ID’s when connecting to NFS. The client uses domain information stored in a file /etc/idmapd.conf. Look at the section [General].

[General]
Verbosity = 0
Pipefs-Directory = /var/lib/nfs/rpc_pipefs
Domain = domainname

The value behind “Domain” should match the configuration of your NFS server. In the case of NFSv4 user and group mappings, this is the value that should follow the @ behind the corresponding unix user  name.
An example;
On the NFS server, there has to be a mapping between Unix user “username” with  id “2010″ and in /etc/idmapd.conf the domain name “domainname” is set. On the NFS server, you use the NFS specific utility to configure a mapping for NFSv4 for “username@domainname”.

At this point I can only supply an example for a BlueArc HNAS usermapping.

BLUEARC CLI#> user-mapping-add --unix-name username --unix-id 2010 --nfsv4-name username@domainname

After succesful configuration, the NFS client log should display the following.

Feb 25 14:24:51 nfsclient rpc.idmapd[30316]: Client 15: (user) name "username@domainname" -> id "2010"

The same method applies to the group names, which obviously will need a mapping corresponding to the group names and ID’s.

So for all the people looking at the same problem in the near future, this post should help you a bit.

About a week ago I received a Lenovo M90z long term evaluation unit through Ivy Worldwide. I am part of a second wave of promotional reviews. The first wave also had a series of M90z price drawings or give-aways, so stay tuned. You might just be able to win one through this site. But more importantly, my findings will of course be a candid and unbiased.

It has taken me a couple of days to set it up because I am doing like a milion things at the same time. I am supposed to integrate the M90z into my normal computer based work routine as much as possible, so I can provide my readers (that’s you) with a lot of detailed background information based on normal day to day work.

I will be posting several parts on this because I think there is more to tell than would reasonably fit on one page, and usage experience takes some time to develop. First I will post some general usage and usability information pages, and later on the focus will shift into having the M90z act as tool to help physically and mentally challenged children develop by means of purpose build touch screen aware software.

Setting it up

Setting it up actually isn’t such a big deal. It is an all-in-one computer, so freeing it from it’s carboard prison is actually all the work that needs to be done.

In the box, there is a power cable and a Lenovo (USB wired) keyboard. Getting the device out of the box actually was a bit more work than I expected it to be, because of the weight of the device. You will need someone to hold the box when you use the woven Lenovo bag to lift the M90z out of the box. The bag the device is shipped in will make you think you can carry the device with you to wherever you are going, but the devices weight is going to get you an appointment with a chiropractor. I think you will find a decent place in your home or office to put it and keep it there.

If you think about it, it is an all-in-one device (computer, powersupply, monitor and what not), which also means you will get all the weight-in-one. Makes sense.

First Impressions

My first impressions were like I am used to with Lenovo gear. It feels and looks very solid and well build. Although it is more a personal taste thing, I don’t think Lenovo would win any design contest with their gear, but this M90z actually has very nice design from its overall case to the metal footing.

Powering on the device is like all preinstalled computers. You will have to respond to a couple of questions for the preinstalled Windows 7 professional (default is 32bit, but 64bit is also available) to complete the installation. After that, you are good to go. I usally make sure all available software updates are installed before doing anything else. This machine downloaded about 600MB of updates after the first boot. Then just a couple of more reboots for all the Microsoft Windows  updates to be installed, which obviously still isn’t possible in one go.

A problem with an all-in-one devices is keeping it cool. While running idle, you can clearly hear the fans inside the machine producing quite some noise. It is a bit too loud for my taste, but in an busy office environment, nobody will notice. For my home office, I do think it would need to be quiter. Maybe there is some tweaking to be done to have the cooling fans speed up or slow down based on internal temperatures.

Multitouch Screen

The 23″ Widescreen (16:9) has a 1920×1080 resolution, enabling a ton of information on screen and at your fingertips. The touch precision is actually quite amazing. The screen quality is very good and I have absolutely no complaints here. It wil take some getting used to when you have been weelding a mouse for a long time. My oldest son has been operating the touchscreen with the back of a pen or his Nintento DS stylus, which also seems to work great.

There is a small problem for me when trying to scroll through full screen windows where the scrollbar is to the most righthand side of the screen. The screens edge is quite thick, which seem to prevent my fingertip to reach far enough into the corners and edges to operate the scrollbar slider. The same is true for the default on-screen keyboard widget which is on the lefthand side. And no, I don’t have fat fingers

The shiny glass surface could be anoying some times when you have a lot of reflection. But this is not unlike all other devices with glossy screens. Make sure you find a good spot to put your screen without to much hinderance from light sources.

I did some tests on the multitouch pinch and zoom functions on a couple of pictures and webpages. The response was very sluggish here. In many cases the CTRL+ or CTRL- key combinations worked a lot faster. But I have just been at it for about an hour. I will put up a post later on when I have been doing a lot more tweaking and have been “simulating” real work for a couple of weeks.

Please stay tuned for more later on….

More on this review;

• QNAP TS439 II Pro, Part I
• QNAP TS439 II Pro, Part II

Backup / Replication:

After having set up the box in its most basic form, I tried to set up replication to another “not NAS” server (like I had running on my Linux box). This is done through the web interface and is fairly straight forward, once you have a basic understanding of RSYNC. On the receiving end you will need to set up a basic rsyncd.conf file with a module name and a path to sync with.

Here is an example rsyncd.conf file.

[ModuleName]
 comment = Rsync Target
 path = <path to sync with>
 use chroot = yes
 max connections=10
 lock file = /var/lock/rsyncd
 read only = no
 list = yes
 uid = <youruid>
 gid = <yourgid>
 strict modes = yes
 hosts allow = <your host that should get access>
 hosts deny =
 ignore errors = no
 ignore nonreadable = yes
 transfer logging = no
 log format = %t: host %h (%a) %o %f (%l bytes). Total %b bytes.
 timeout = 600
 refuse options = checksum dry-run
 dont compress = *.gz *.tgz *.zip *.z *.rpm *.deb *.iso *.bz2 *.tbz

From the QNAP webgui you can set weekly, daily rsync intervals, limiting to only a single rsync schedule per day. If you have enabled SSH access, you can just simply edit the QNAP crontab to enable an hourly sync or whatever you would prefer. Just make sure you comply to crontab syntax.
Warning! Since the webgui does not support this, you might get undesired results after reverting back to the webgui once you have manually edited the crontab.

Here is an example from the QNAP crontab, having two schedules defined through the webgui.

0 6 * * * /etc/init.d/rsyncRR.sh Schedule0 2>/dev/null
0 5 * * * /etc/init.d/rsyncRR.sh Schedule1 2>/dev/null

I have it running now for about a week, and so far all seems to replicating (rsyncing) just nicely.

I have not had the chance to set up QNAP-to-QNAP replication, so I had no means of documenting my findings for you. Maybe if Chris M. Evans gets his hands on a QNAP box for review I could set up replication with Chris.

The webgui is pretty straightforward on this. You have to enable incoming replication traffic first on the NAS box. Of course you will have to make sure you punch the appropriate holes and configure the right port forwarders in your firewall (assuming you have one).

The QNAP box offers one USB port in the front, with a large BACKUP button alongside. If you plug in an USB drive, you can have the QNAP backup all your QNAP content to the USB attached drive. You will have to have a large drive though if you have a large capacity QNAP. For me, this would make no sense because I am replicating all my valuable data to a remote location.
QNAP might be smart to add some granularity to this one-button-backup option, so you can specify what to backup to the USB drive.

At the back of the QNAP box, there are four more USB ports, and an eSATA port, so you can expand your QNAP box with quite some capacity.

Installing additional packages:

From the administration panel you can navigate to the Applications sections and then select QPKG Plugins.

Here you can find your way easily to additional packages you can install. My favorites are in the following sections.

Dropbox:

I am a very big fan of Dropbox, so I really wanted to have Dropbox also running on the QNAP to synchronise a folder with my other workstations, especially my laptop for when I am working at a customers location or while traveling.

For the SABnzbdplus part of my usage, I have an NZB folder in my Dropbox synchronized folders which is watched for new downloads. That way I only have to put the nzb file in my Dropbox folder and the SABnzbdplus daemon on the QNAP will pick it up automatically. Maybe it’s just because I am lazy but it works for me hat way

QNAP does not support or offer packages for Dropbox on the QNAP boxes. The TS439 is based on Intel Atom processors, and runs Busybox, so there should be no reason it does not work on these QNAP series. I have found a couple of posts on this topic in the QNAP forum and have been able install and run a Dropbox client on my QNAP.

For your own Dropbox on an Intel based QNAP, please review this forum thread. Be advised, it will NOT work on ARM based QNAP boxes.

Download Station:

The QNAP box offers a Download Station section, which has various Torrent tools in there. I don’t use any torrents at all, so I had no use for it. I do occasionally use SABnzbdplus. This package is available from the QNAP Applications download site. You can install it through the webgui without any problem.
You do need to install the “Python 2.7″ qpkg first though.  Once you have install SABnzbdplus, you can reach it through your web browser at http://<your-qnap-hostname-or-ip>:8800/sabnzbd/

Downloading Podcasts:

I do listen to a bunch of podcasts, and I want them to be downloaded very shortly after the are published. On the QNAP you can most easily do this by means of “castget“. To install castget, you will first need to install “QPKG – Optware”. This enables the ipkg command line utility. You might want to read the QNAP Wiki on castget. The WIKI install quide refers to ARM based QNAPs, but this also works on the Intel Atom series.
There are many discussions about adding a PodCast downloading option to the QNAP code, as well as there are many discussion about adding Dropbox to the QNAP code, but there is not a single sign from QNAP indicating they have plans to integrate these tools.

Overall impression:

The QNAP is an excellent NAS box with series ranging from low end home user usage to a small business range, with disk expansion encloseres. The 3.x code running offers a wide range of features. For the simple home use environments and the novice user this might appear a bit to complex. For the experienced user and IT masters, it will be a piece of cake to set up and maintain the QNAP NAS box.

The sheer number of features is astounding, Modding the QNAP is no problem and even supported (to some extent of course) by QNAP. The user forum is very active and as far as I have been able to experience,  response is swift and helpful.

The QNAP box has been purring for a few weeks now, and so far it has done excellent service for me. Replication, serving multimedia content all worked perfectly so far. I have done two firmware upgrades along the way, and they too went smooth.

I am definitely in for another set in my home/office.

More on this review;

• QNAP TS439 II Pro, Part I
• QNAP TS439 II Pro, Part III

Sorry it took me like forever to write up the remaining parts. Work work work… Money doesn’t come flying through the door by itself you know….
Ok, for you guys that have been waiting for the rest, here is some more reviewing…

Initial Setup

I appologize for the crapy pics I made. Just proofs I am not a photographer.

When booting the device for the first time, it will ask you how you want to set up RAID. It will notice the number of disks you have inserted. If you have only two drives installed, it will ask you if you want RAID1. If you have three or four drives installed it will offer RAID5 as its initial setup. This is all displayed on the front LCD panel, and the two buttons on the right will allow you to change this initial setting. After setting the RAID level you can also choose to encrypt the drives.

Once you have navigated through these initial settings, and it is only the two I mentioned (RAID and encryption) the QNAP will start preparing for initial use. It will take about 15 minutes before you will get access to the web interface. The RAID formatting/synchronisation is not done at that time. It will continue in the background, but you can start using the device if you like.

If you have DHCP in your network, the QNAP will get its IP settings from DHCP and will display it’s IP address in the front LCD panel. If you have no DHCP you will need to get to the QNAP at its APIPA address.

The supplied CDrom also provides you with a discovery tool to help you set up the QNAP.

Web Interface / Management

After initial set you can access the webgui at the IP address you have set up or the one provided by DHCP. Simply navigate your favorite web browser to http://<your-qnap-ip> and it will automatically redirect you to the appropriate section and TCP port for administration.

The main window shows a Apple-cover-flow-like panel which lets you choose what section to use. It will not flow on mouse-over though, but you need to click through it.

Still, for a home NAS appliance it is pretty fancy. You can select the administration section, multimedia station, surveillance station, web file manager or whatever you might have installed and enabled.

The web interface looks very slick and is very responsive. I guess this is among the places you will notice the dual-core Atom processor.

I will only address the most interesting (to me that is) parts of the webgui. The rest is pretty straightforward and self-explanatory. The overall management is very easy en GUI response is swift and informative. No cryptic responses leaving you guessing to the problem.

The resources page gives you tons of information that many system administrator would love to have on his server. In that respect, this QNAP box is very much like a server in respect to all the possible tasks it can perform. If you have your QNAP box working like crazy, be sure to check the resource monitor pages to see how your QNAP handles the load.

If you wish to see more, please drop me a note or comment, and I will see if I can update the posts.

Raid Information

When logged in to the Administration console it is easy to see the status of the RAID array. You can also use the excellent wizards to modify the RAID set. You can check all the hard disk information (if the drive is SMART enabled) and even set up a special temperature alert (next to the other alerts).

The GUI also lets you see in the description field what type of actions you can perform on your array.

uPnP / DLNA – TwonkyMedia

Like most popular home NAS devices, the QNAP also sports a nice DLNA/uPNP media server. You can simply enable it (license key is incorporated and part of the purchase of the QNAP device) through the GUI.

You now get presented a new url to click so you can access the web interface of the Twonky Media server, which to my taste looks awful but is very very usable.

For more about twonky, please follow this link.

Stay tuned for another part….

About a week ago I finally got my home NAS device, a “QNAP TS 439 II Pro“.

I have been postponing this purchase for years now since I had my own home brew Linux server acting as a NAS station. I only decided to phase out the Linux server in favour for the small NAS box because after 10 years always-on usage, my Linux server began to have some stability issues.

For me the new NAS device had to be able to support all features I was using on my Linux server. More features were nice, but not required.

• Replicate personal data on regular intervals, like digital photos and scanned documents.
• Replicate backups from my website and database (along with the website of a couple of friends) to the NAS box.
• Serve multimedia content using uPnP/DLNA to the media players in my house. Transcoding not required.
• Download podcasts on regular intervals.
• Download other content like TV shows and or movies.
• Serve as a surveillance station for a webcam or maybe even two eventually.
• Have fairly good performance.

Like Synology, QNAP has several models that support all of these features. Maybe not all of them out-of-the-box, but they can all be implemented in some way. Besides what I wanted it to support, the QNAP has a bunch more features you can use. I went for the QNAP based on various posts I read on the web and features the do offer. In the end I do not think it would have made much difference. Pricing is however somewhat higher for the Synology boxes with 4 or more drives (as far as I have been able to investigate).

Unboxing:

The QNAP came in a nice cardboard box with sufficient soft protection to make sure your box can sit in your cabinet or on your desk without dents or scratches. Like most other products, there is nothing wrong with the packaging. When you order your gear at a webshop, make sure you check a couple of reviews on that shop to make sure they send their orders in decent and discrete packaging.
I tend to order at the same webshop most of the time, because I know them and am very satisfied with their services. I know it sometimes can be somewhat cheaper, but that is not my most important criteria.

Within the box, there is also a smaller box with the power and network cables. Yes more than one network cable, as this QNAP model has a dual 1GbE interface. Also you will find a small plastic wrapping with the necessary screws to secure your hard drives in the brackets. For those who care to use it, there is also a CDrom with all the user documentation you need. In my case, these mostly end up in the bin.

External appearance:

From the outside the box has a decent and firm look. The surrounding cover is made up out of brushed aluminium and seems to have a clear coating over the metal. I guess it helps keeping the box clear of smudges. At the front is a small but very bright blue LCD panel indicating the IP address and status. After running a few minutes this display dims and only a couple of subtle LED’s are lit to indicate activity and system status.

The front cover is clearly a plastic cover and it also feels that way. This to me kind of seems disappointing in comparison to the side and top covers. The drive brackets are also made of plastic but have a metal cage to place either a 2.5″ HDD or 3.5″ HDD in.

The option of a 2.5″ or 3.5″ contributes to user flexibility but also has the SMB market in mind. I myself will be quite satisfied with the slower but larger capacity drives, but some businesses or high end users might have more need for faster or “greener” 2.5″ drives. It’s up to you, QNAP offers the possibility to go either way.

Be on the lookout for some follow up posts.