Qsan XCubeNAS XN5104R review
This review first appeared in issue 356 of PC Pro. Representing the entry point of Qsan’s new NAS appliance family, the XCubeNAS XN5104R offers SMBs a small footprint storage solution with plenty of room to grow. This competitively priced 1U rack NAS presents four hot-swap LFF/SFF SATA drive bays at the front, secretes a pair of NVMe SSD slots inside and teams them up with four 2.5GbE multi-gigabit ports. A quad-core 2.3GHz Intel Xeon D-1714 CPU sits in the driving seat and is partnered by 8GB of DDR4 which can be expanded hugely to 256GB. There’s room for more network ports, as the spare PCI-E Gen4 slot accepts Qsan’s dual-port 10GbE and 25GbE cards. A compelling feature of Qsan’s NAS appliances is their enormous expansion potential, and the XN5104R is no exception. Fit Qsan’s SAS3 PCI-E card and you can daisy-chain a mix of external disk shelves for a total of 414 drives and a maximum raw capacity of 9PB. It may have a small footprint, but the XCubeNAS has huge pot...