Content folders can be temporarily taken off line by unchecking them—handy if you’re your updating a lot of content on the TS-409 Pro and want to keep users from accessing it until you’re finished (a good practice). Simply recheck them to enable them again when you’re through. More advanced settings allow you to create custom navigation trees, modify music file naming conventions and so on. If you need an extra layer of protection, you can even define a login and password to keep others from tampering with your settings.

After a few mouse clicks, I powered up my Xbox 360 and had it connected to the TS-409 Pro. The Smart Playlists I had configured in the iTunes server was there. The photos I selected were there. The only additional step was a quick Optional Media Update from Microsoft to support unprotected iTunes music files in AAC format, and MPEG-4 movies. In minutes, I set up a slide show of my photos, and had no problems playing non-DRM encoded movies or music through the Xbox 360. Needless to say, I was impressed with the speed and ease of the operation, and the experience helped get rid of the bad taste in my mouth left by Multimedia Station.

Apple’s iTunes allows you to install your music and media collection on up to five machines. As you might imagine, keeping them all updated with your latest purchases and playlists on multiple PCs and Macs can be quite a chore. The QNAP TS-409 Pro Turbo Station NAS can alleviate most of the burden by allowing you to store, update and play all the protected and non-protected songs in your iTunes collection—Movies, TV Shows and Podcasts are not supported (now you know why I said most of the burden)—directly from the TS-409 Pro. And the Smart Playlist feature allows you to arrange and group the songs by multiple criteria. With QNAP’s iTunes Server up to five Macs or PCs (or any combination of the two) can now access and play your music collection from a single location. With most NAS appliances, iTunes support tends to be hit-and-miss—more miss than hit, actually. So I was eager to put QNAP’s implementation of it to the test.

First, you need to make sure that the appropriate rights for all your users, whether individual or group, is set on the Qmultimedia folder on the TS-409 Pro. Copy your iTunes folder containing your playlist and music files to the Qmultimedia share on the NAS.

Next, go to Network Settings-->iTunes Service in Server Administration and tick the checkbox next to iTunes Service to enable it. You can also check the Password required option and specify a password that will allow only those users you give the password to, access to your iTunes collection on the TS-409 Pro. Click the Apply button to save your changes. Note that whenever you make any changes on this page or to your Smart Playlists, a dialog box will appear, warning you that all iTunes connections will be temporarily disconnected to register the change when you click OK to continue. As a result, it’s a good idea to make sure no one else is on the network rockin’ out to their favorite tunes on the NAS when you’re creating and updating playlists, or changing passwords.

Launch iTunes on one of your networked PCs. You should have a new category named SHARED. Underneath will be a little blue icon with a music note on it. To the left will be a little arrow and the right, the server name of your TS-409 Pro. Double-click on the icon. The arrow will point down; iTunes will display a message saying that it’s loading your NAS by its server name. Another iTunes window containing your entire music library will open. At this point, a number of things will no doubt get you attention.

First, you cannot create your own playlists under to the NAS entry as you could on your local hard drive. That featured is disabled. Nor can you modify any of the songs in any way. You can’t drag and drop songs to and from the NAS playlist. You can’t cut and paste them here and there. Click on a song and play it. Under the Now Playing Window all you’ll get is an “Album Artwork Not Modifiable” message. No album artwork. And no, it doesn’t matter if you have given yourself Full Access permissions on the Qmultimedia folder. New songs must be downloaded from iTunes to the iTunes folder on your local hard drive, then copied to the Qmultimedia share on the NAS, along with your updated iTunes Libray.itl and iTunes Music Library.xlm files. For all intents and purposes, iTunes songs served from the TS-409 Pro are read-only.

Why? Most likely to prevent multiple users from corrupting song and library files. If I’m listening to a particular song on my PC from the NAS, and you’re trying to change its rating, album art, genre or other information under its properties—or physically move it from the playlist that I’m listening to it from, to an entirely different playlist, it’s easy to see how that might cause problems.

You can visually sort the songs in the networked playlist by the Name, Time, Artist, Album, Genre columns. You can even move them around by dragging and dropping them. You can add additional columns to the display to sort on. However, some of them—like Ratings—may not display any data as they would when the songs are viewed from the iTunes folder on your local hard drive.

One thing you definitely can do, is use Smart Playlist to better organize the songs on the TS-409 Pro. Smart Playlist allows you to create rules for defining playlists based on the following criteria from the dropdown menus: Album Title, Artist, Genre, File Path, Year, Bit Rate and Date Added—and by utilizing the following Boolean Logic modifiers: contains, does not contain, is, and is not. For example, if I wanted to create a Jazz Smart Playlist with all of the music categorized as Jazz in my iTunes collection, I would create a rule that would look like this:

Name: Jazz

Match of the above rules:

Genre contains Jazz

This is obviously a simple, single-tier rule. Multiple tiered rules can be created, and individual tiers can be deleted by clicking either the <Plus >or <Minus> button that appears at the end of each completed rule. You can also go back and edit rules and tiers.

I ran into a number of “interesting” situations with QNAP’s implementation of Smart Playlist. First, there are certain characters that the TS-409 Pro’s Smart Playlist simply won’t accept. A perfect example of this is the R&B/Soul category in iTunes. If you try to create a Smart Playlist on the TS-409 Pro called R&B/Soul, you’ll get a Cannot contain these characters: & “ > < error message. After constantly drawing a blank trying pull all the songs together with rules in different combinations for R B Soul and RB Soul, I gave up and re-categorized all of my songs in my iTunes collection under R&B/Soul into a new Rhythm-Blues and Soul category; then created a Smart Playlist rule with the same name, finally populating the playlist with the desired songs. Another minor but annoying glitch with Smart Playlists I encountered, is that there were times it took multiple attempts of creating and re-creating the same rule, just to get the songs in the criteria to populate the playlist.

I was able to get some of the album art to display from the TS-409 Pro on another PC on my network—though it did so sporadically (it still didn’t work on the workstation PC). I accomplished this by going into iTunes on my workstation PC and selecting EditàPreferences, then checking the Share my library on my local network and Share entire library options on the Share tab. Doing this placed my PC with the TS-409 Pro under SHARING on the other PCs on my network. When I removed the two previously selected sharing options from my workstation, the album art no longer at all showed on the other PC. In both instances, the latest version of iTunes (as of this writing)—Version 7.6.1.9—was installed on both systems. Hopefully QNAP can address these little niggling points in their next firmware update. Minor annoyances aside, my iTunes collection played flawlessly from the TS-409 Pro on both PCs—simultaneously—without any lag, or other playback glitches.

Stretchin' Out: QNAP RAID Expansion & Migration

The main advantage of a multi-drive NAS over a single drive model is not only the additional protection it can provide for your data with its redundant RAID capabilities—but its superior upgradability. When they were released on the market years ago and still in their infancy, upgrading a NAS like the TS-409 Pro with larger drives for more storage, changing the level of RAID—or both—could be a tedious and time consuming affair. First, you had to back up all of your data from the NAS. Then nstall the new drives; initialize and format them, and select your new RAID config. Hours later, depending on what method you used to back up your data, you might have to re-create all of your shares and reassign them to your users. Then restore the data from your backup to those shares, which could also take hours. Not fun.

Fortunately, NAS appliances have evolved since then. Technologies have emerged to take some of the pain out of upgrading storage and changing RAID configurations while all of your shares and data remain intact! The QNAP TS-409 Pro Turbo NAS employs several such technologies: Online RAID Capacity Expansion and Online RAID Level Migration.

Online RAID Capacity Expansion allows you to install the most cost-effective drives for your initial setup of the TS-409 Pro now, then upgrade to larger drives in the future for more storage. All of your existing shares and data remains intact and is seamlessly transferred over to your new, larger drives—saving you the extra time of having to perform a backup and restore specifically for upgrading the NAS. For example, a TS-409 Pro with four 250GB drives in a RAID 5 array can upgrade to a four 1GB drives, with the original data intact and transferred over to the new 3TB RAID array.

The procedure for Online RAID Capacity Expansion replaces one drive at a time, synchronizing the data from the remaining old drives to the new ones as each of the older drives is replaced. Once all of the old drives have been replaced with the new ones, the Expand Capacity function expands the RAID array to its new, larger size. The prerequisite for Online RAID Capacity Expansion, is that the existing drives to be replaced in the TS-409 Pro must be configured a RAID 1, 5 or 6 array (the other drive configurations, including RAID 0 is not supported).

If budgetary constraints force you to start with just a single hard drive in your TS-409 Pro, fear not. With Online RAID Level migration, you can add more drives for greater capacity and configure them in a RAID array for extra protection when you’re ready. Online RAID Level Migration can also help you take a two-drive RAID 1 config to a 4-drive RAID 5 or 6 config just as easily. For example, a TS-409 Pro with a single terabyte hard drive can have 3 additional terabyte drives added to create a 3TB RAID 5 array, with the original data intact and transferred over from the single volume drive, to the new RAID 5 array. Two 500GB drives in a RAID 1 array can be migrated to a 1.5TB RAID 5 array.

The Procedure for Online RAID Level Migration is similar to Online RAID Capacity Expansion, except there’s less drive shuffling involved, as you’ll be adding drives to the TS-409 Pro. Naturally, RAID 0 and the other drive configurations aren’t supported. Why? They aren’t redundant. You can also perform an Online RAID Capacity Expansion and RAID Level Migration together.

Both operations are performed under QNAP Server Administration through Device ConfigurationàRAID Management. While performing either operation is fairly straightforward, I strongly recommend that you print out the TurboNAS-Application-09-Online RAID Expansion & Migration_V1.0_ENG .PDF guide from the \Manual\TS-409\Application Notes folder on the CD,;read it, and keep it close by for reference. Although both operations are designed to preserve your data, it never hurts to have a current backup of all your data from the NAS standing by. After all, you never know when our old pal and favorite royal pain Murphy might decide to drop in…

Server Administration does a good job of walking you through either procedure, prompting you when to remove and insert drives, and so on. The NAS provides audio cues as well, beeping when necessary. Don’t remove or insert a drive until you’re prompted to do so. Don’t try to access the drives until the process is finished. And do not turn off the TS-409 Pro during the process until it has been completed.

Once you’ve popped in the final drive for upgrading, plan on taking a break—and probably a long one. Depending on the amount of data being migrated to the new drives and array, and the capacity of the drives involved, the Online RAID Capacity Expansion or RAID Level Migration could take, as QNAP points out, “from hours to tens of hours.” I can attest to the accuracy of that statement, as the Online RAID Level Migration show in the photos and screenshots of this review took over 10 hours to complete. You can check on the progress of the procedure in Server Administration from time to time if you wish, which will tell you when the process has successfully finished.