A great inclusion with the TS-209 Pro which we’ve seen with other QNAP devices in the past (such as the TS-109) is the inclusion of a download manager. Instead of taking up your time and computer resources downloading your torrents, or even FTP/HTTP downloads, you can now hand them off to the NAS device to do it for you and store them on the network drive for everyone to access (or just yourself if you so choose) and even choose how long you’d like to seed the torrents after it completes – and you all seed your torrents don’t you?!?

The USB ports on the TS-209 Pro allow you to plug in almost any external storage device, such as external hard drives, flash drives, even USB card readers and either share them over the network automatically, or back them up to the TS-209’s hard drives by way of the ‘one-touch copy button’. There is a designated folder setup within the QNAP’s drives by default just for this function. We tried this with a standard 2.5” external hard drive and about 40GB worth of data, and it was horrendously slow, running at about 2-3MB/s. Needless to say it took hours to complete the backup. Why it was so slow I really don’t know, accessing the USB hard drive through the TS-209 Pro via the network is as fast as you’d expect it to be at around 10MB/s (my notebook only has 100Mbit network even though the QNAP has Gigabit so 10MB/s is as good as you’ll get), perhaps it does this backups as very low priority, even when the device isn’t being used for anything else? I really can’t explain it.

The USB ports can also be used to replicate the data on the TS-209 onto an external drive for additional data redundancy, or you can connect a USB printer into the TS-209 and have it act as a network print server, yet another handy feature for the home or office.

For basic access to the TS-209 Pro’s network drives/directories, you can simply browse to the device through windows networking and map the desired folder as a network drive. The TS-209 Pro can be accessed by Windows, Mac and Linux environments all at once, with the ability to share files between all the operating systems, so basically if you have a computer, you’ll be able to access it. Providing you’ve been given an account and password of course.

The ‘Pro’ version we are looking at today differs from the standard version is just two areas. Firstly the Pro version is about AU$40 more expensive, and secondly it includes Active Directory Support, so you can get the TS-209 Pro to connect to and become a member of your office Domain, and grab all the users and access rights from the domain controller, helping it to seamlessly integrate into your office network. If you don’t need this function then you’d simply buy the standard TS-209 instead, as everything else is the same.

Average user rating