Qnap is moving further into enterprise territory with the launch of two rack devices that aim to offer a tantalizing combination of storage, performance and capacity features. There's certainly plenty of power available with the review-leading TS-h1677AXU-RP with a 3.8GHz 8-core AMD Ryzen 7 7700 CPU paired with fast DDR5 memory.
The device features sixteen hot-swappable LFF/SFF drive bays on the front, and inside you'll find a pair of M.2 2280 PCIe Gen5 slots for NVMe SSDs. Capacity expansion is great as Qnap offers a wide range of JBOD enclosures: the TS-h1677AXU-RP supports up to eight 4U 24-bay TL-R2400PES-RP racks for a total of 208 drives and over 4PB of storage.
Networking looks good as the device features two integrated 2.5GbE and 10GbE RJ45 ports, all of the multi-Gigabit variety. There's room for more as it has three additional PCIe Gen4 expansion slots and Qnap offers a good choice of 2.5, 10, 25 and 100 GbE cards.
Qnap TS-h1677AXU-RP review: Software options
The 'h' in the model name clearly shows which operating system (OS) Qnap is targeting with this device, but it also has the option to load QTS. However, before you start, keep in mind that there are many differences between them and that you can only switch from one to the other after backing up your data and rebooting the device.
QTS is best for SMBs that want simplified data protection features, as it supports manual and scheduled snapshots on EXT4 volumes. Its snapshot service only requires a minimum of 1GB of memory, the maximum SSD cache size of 4TB needs 16GB of system memory, and QTS supports Qtier 2 data migration feature.
ZFS-based QuTS hero will be the preferred choice for most enterprises as it offers many more data integrity and storage reduction features. End-to-end checksums provide transparent recovery from data corruption, support triple parity RAID and triple mirroring, large storage savings can be achieved with inline data deduplication plus compression, and WORM (write-in) policies can be applied. once, read many) to the NAS. share to protect your data from accidental tampering or deletion.
There's a good reason why the device comes with a base 32GB of memory, as the QuTS is more demanding in this department. You need at least 16GB for its online data deduplication feature, 32GB for the best performance of 10GbE connections and this too for SSD cache sizes up to 1TB.
Qnap TS-h1677AXU-RP review: 25GbE performance
We opted to test over 25GbE and installed a Qnap QXG-25G2SF-CX4 dual-port 25GbE adapter on the device and installed another on the lab's Dell PowerEdge R650xs Xeon Scalable Rack Server running Windows Server 2022. During installation , we chose QuTS hero from the web-based wizard and used dual-mirrored NVMe SSD as the system pool and four 22TB Western Digital Red Pro hard drives in a RAID5 array for data storage.
NAS performance is excellent with a mapped share returning Iometer sequential read and write speeds of 23.1 Gbits/s and 23 Gbits. Switching to random operations produced equally impressive read and write speeds of 23.1 Gbits/sec and 22.5 Gbits/sec.
IP SAN performance was very similar with a 1 TB iSCSI target offering sequential read and write speeds of 23.1 Gbits/s and 23 Gbits/s and 23.1 Gbits/s and 22.5 Gbits/s for random operations. Turning up the heat with a dual 25GbE MPIO link, Iometer reported sequential and random read and write speeds of 46.2 Gbits/s and 42.1 Gbits/s and 46.2 Gbits/s and 37.5 Gbits/s respectively.
The results of our random NAS and IP SAN Iometer tests clearly show how efficient QuTS hero ZFS ARC (Adaptive Read Cache) and ZIL (ZFS Intent Log) are. Basically, you don't need to waste storage bays on SSD caching, as you're unlikely to see significant improvements over these numbers.
Qnap TS-h1677AXU-RP review: Data protection features
There are no compromises on data integrity as QuTS hero offers ZFS copy-on-write for fast, nearly unlimited snapshots of NAS shares and iSCSI LUNs that can be scheduled to run every minute for near-continuous protection. Both NAS shares and iSCSI LUNs can now be encrypted and the SnapSync application provides fast, low-bandwidth replication to remote devices using real-time and scheduled block-level snapshots.
WORM offers valuable protection against ransomware and, once enabled during NAS folder creation, cannot be modified or disabled. The Enterprise policy allows deletion of a protected folder, but prevents any content within it from being modified or individually deleted, while the stricter Compliance policy blocks folder deletion and only allows deletion by deleting the entire storage group.
Backup applications abound with Hybrid Backup Sync (HBS) 3 managing 3-2-1 protection strategies and protecting data from local devices to cloud providers or remote NAS devices to external storage. The Hyper Data Protector (HDP) app supports VMware and Hyper-V virtualized environments, features a dedicated web console for VM backup and restore tasks, and can now remotely protect PCs and servers with the free NetBak Agent from Qnap loaded on them.
More security features are available as, along with Antivirus, Malware Remover and QuFirewall applications, Qnap Security Advisor uses predefined scanning policies to search for vulnerabilities and bring them to your attention. The device has enough power to host virtual machines and Container Station, Ubuntu Linux Station and Virtualization Station applications are available for QuTS hero.
Qnap TS-h1677AXU-RP Review: Is it worth it?
The TS-h1677AXU-RP is comparatively good value, with its starting price of around £4,314 offering a powerful NAS package powered by a fast AMD Ryzen 7 7700 CPU and DDR5 memory. To put this into perspective, Synology's 16-bay RS4021xs+ costs just over £4,000 and this only gets you an old Xeon D-1541 CPU and 16GB of DDR4 memory.
In addition to impressive storage potential, the TS-h1677AXU-RP has no restrictions on HDD and SSD as Qnap's compatibility list includes all major manufacturers. The device performed excellently in our 25GbE NAS and IP SAN performance tests, and Qnap's QuTS hero operating system provides an excellent range of data protection and integrity features.
Qnap TS-h1677AXU-RP specifications
| Chassis | 3U Rack Chassis |
| CPU | AMD Ryzen 7 7700 8-core 3.8 GHz |
| Memory | 32 GB DDR5 UDIMM (maximum 128 GB) |
| Storage | 16 SATA LFF/SFF slots, 2 M.2 2280 PCIe Gen5 slots |
| RAID | RAID0, 1, 5, 6, 10, 50, 60, triple mirror, triple parity |
| Expansion | 3 PCIe generation 4 |
| Grid | 2 x 2.5 GbE, 2 x 10 GbE RJ45 (all multi-Gigabit) |
| Other ports | 2 USB Type A 3.2 Gen 2 |
| Force | 2 hot-pluggable 550W power supplies |
| Management | Web navigator |
| Warranty | 5 years limited |
