Hoping to bulldoze small and medium concern sales, NAS-makers have been pushing to deliver enterprise features such as cloud storage, virtualization support, automated backup software and iSCSI back up. There's also been an attempt to include technologies such as Link Aggregation, which can increase network bandwidth when dealing with multiple users and also provides redundancy in case one of the links fails.

It's possible to use Link Assemblage on several ports, so if a NAS device has four ports, information technology'south possible to create a pair of aggregated ports. However, this presents a problem as it occupies many ports on the switch and any one connection is still limited to Gigabit speeds. As a consequence, we've started seeing high-stop business-oriented NAS devices that provide optional 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) back up.

First seen over a decade ago, 10GbE is non a new technology, but it's been largely reserved for pricey enterprise devices. It's ten times faster than Gigabit Ethernet and only supports full duplex point to bespeak links, which are generally connected by network switches, so 10GbE hubs don't exist.

The 10GbE standard is slowly gaining momentum. One million ports where shipped in 2007, twice that volume was moved in 2009 and 3 one thousand thousand were shipped in 2022. That figure will only continue to increment as 10GbE networking becomes a more affordable option for small to medium businesses.

File re-create performance at 10GbE rates showcased above.
Obviously the speed is there, so it's a matter of whether you need this kind of throughput or not.

With that in heed, we're checking out two new high-end SMB NAS devices: the QNAP TS-879 Pro, which costs $ii,200 without its optional 10GbE network card, and the $3,500 Synology DS3612xs.

Evidently both devices sell for a premium, only because their somewhat unique capabilities they could prove to exist invaluable for many businesses. Read on.