QNAP TS-419P Turbo NAS 4-Bay Network Storage Review

QNAP TS-419P Setup and Configuration

Following the directions, I was told to insert the CD and execute the product CD. I selected the TS-419P and came to the following screen where I got stuck. I am supposed to click on the link to install QNAP Finder, but the link is obscured by a link to read the PDF Quick Install Guide. I was able to get around this mistake by using the Browse CD link and navigating to the finder folder and installing the software manually.

After installing the software, I ran the QNAP finder where the TS419P was detected. Wanting to see how easy it would be to setup, I decided to use the Quick Setup Wizard.

Here I ran into a little problem when I was redirected to a browser that wanted me to initialize the hard drive and install the firmware. At first I was confused because when I downloaded the latest version of the firmware from the QNAP website, uploading and installing the firmware seemed to fail. After several attempts to load the latest version, I tried uploading and installing the firmware off the product CD.

Installing from the CD worked and allowed me to figure out why the download from the website did not work. The website version was zipped and the CD version was not. After unzipping the website version, I was then able to update the firmware with the latest version.

Once the firmware was done updating and a quick reboot, I was able to proceed to the quick configuration screen.

Step 1 consisted of naming the new server. I just went with the default.

Step 2 consisted of entering a password.

Step 3 consisted of setting the time zone, date and local time. It also had the ability to synchronize the time from an NTP server.

Step 4 consisted of setting up the network using either DHCP or a static ip address. I used DHCP initially even though I knew I would go back and setup a static ip address.

Step 5 consisted of enabling the network services that would be running on the NAS.

Step 6 consisted of setting the RAID configuration. Acceptable configurations included JBOD, RAID 0, RAID 5 and RAID 6. I selected RAID 5 which would give me a little over 1.3 TB of disk space and moved on to the last step.

The last step was to review the settings, then update the settings and initialize the hard drives.

The configuration started fast, but quickly slowed to a crawl once the network services had to be turned on. Once the services were turned on then the initialization of the hard drives started which took about 15 minutes.

Once the TS419P was finished with the quick configuration, the system rebooted and was ready for use.