CONCLUSION

   Up until today 1GbE has been more than enough to cover the needs of households and small offices and in some cases it will continue to be sufficient. However that is certain to change soon for many people (perhaps sooner rather than later) thanks to the increasing size of data and 10GbE is simply put the obvious step forward especially since according to our tests it's indeed up to 10 times faster than 1GbE. Of course cost is always a problem and 10GbE compatible equipment doesn't come cheap thus it will take some time to become affordable for home use but that shouldn't pose a problem for offices and small businesses. The TVS-871U-RP however has many aces up its sleeve so aside the virtualization station which finally works with compatible systems as expected (took a while for QNAP to fix all the bugs) the more "demanding" users can also mount up to two mSATA flash drives (SSDs) as cache devices to further improve read performance. Unfortunately although the TVS-871U-RP-i3-4G is a powerful NAS server in 1GbE mode it fails to shine when compared to other high-end models so unless you plan on upgrading to 10GbE i think you'd be better off with a lower-spec model (perhaps the Celeron model?). All said and done the TVS-871U-RP is not perfect and much like every other rack mount NAS model out there it has two drawbacks. These are its noise levels and power consumption and although there's not much one can do about the noise still you can cut down consumption quite a bit just by removing one of the two power supplies (we did and power consumption dropped to 48W at idle and 62W at load). That way of course you're losing the redundant feature so if the PSU stops working the system will shut down but from personal experience with the TS-469U-RP which uses the same exact type that's extremely hard to happen (our TS-469U-RP has been working 24/7 on a single PSU for all these years without issue).

   We've mentioned numerous times in the past that enterprise-grade products cost a lot because they offer much more compared to regular consumer ones and the TVS-871U-RP is obviously one such product. To be more specific the model we have here (TVS-871U-RP-i3-4G) currently retails for USD2574 inside the USA (Amazon.com) and for 2290Euros inside the EU (Amazon.co.uk) so yes you can say that it's quite expensive. Ontop of that add the need for a 10GbE switch and at least two 10GbE compatible Ethernet cards (one for the NAS and one for the PC) and one such system could potentially set you back even over USD5000/5000Euros (if you decide to get a switch like the XS712T) and that's not including the drives. So we don't expect people to throw money at something like this for home use (not anytime soon) but for small business and even offices solutions like the TVS-871U-RP-i3-4G by QNAP are the future and since this is the fastest and most complete NAS server to ever reach our lab it gets our Platinum Award, simple as that.

PROS

- Excellent Build Quality
- Dual Core Intel Core i3-4150
- Top Of The Charts Performance
- Features
- 4GB DDR3 RAM (Expandable To 32GB)
- 4 Gigabit Ethernet Ports
- 10GbE Ready (Via PCIe Card)
- Redundant Power Supply Units
- 2 mSATA Ports
- 2 PCIe Slots
- 8 USB Ports (4xUSB 3.0 / 4xUSB 2.0)
- HDMI Output
- RAID 0/1/5/6/10/JBOD + Hot Spare/Swap Support
- Eight SATA III Bays(6Gb/s)
- QNAP QTS
- Android Apps

CONS

- Power Consumption (For Some)
- Noise Levels (For Some)
- Price (For Some)