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Play .MKV’s in Windows Media Center (WMC)

Play .MKV’s in Windows Media Center (WMC)

For a long time I had resisted converting my DVD and Blu-Ray disks into any other format because I didn’t want to lose any quality.  I had lived by this rule for a long time, and thankfully companies like QNAP and Thecus came to my storage rescue.  However, the day has come where the cost of storing all the extra garbage that comes along with these movies has opened my eyes to benefits conversions.  With that, I have began converting my movie collection to a format that allows me to lose all the excess fat, but keep my movie loss-less. Read More…

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For testing the transfer speed of the NAS we first used our in-house C.O.D. NAS Benchmarking Utility.  The benchmark is conducted by creating a 46.6GB file (Avatar.iso) and transferring the file to and from the test unit using Robocopy.  The test is run 10 times and then the results are averaged for a final score.

We experienced around a 96.2 MB/s to the NAS and 65.06 MB/s from the NAS to the workstation.  The TS-879U-RP outperformed nearly all the units in the test in transferring a large file to it, including our in-house server.  Only the Thecus N4200PRO was able to eek out a top position in copying from the NAS.

For further benchmarking, we test each NAS using Intel's NAS Performance Toolkit to rate 2 key areas of NAS performance.  We measured File Copy speeds to and from the NAS and the Directory Copy speeds to and from the NAS.  QNAP made a strong showing here by performing in the top spot for copy from speeds, but unexpectedly found a home near the bottom in copying to the NAS.

In the Directory copy tests, you will notice that QNAP seems to be consistent between the two units we tested, the TS-879U-RP and the TS-419P+.  Although the TS-879U-RP outperformed all of the other NASs (Server isn't a NAS) in the "Directory Copy From" it fell short in the "Directory Copy To".

The increase in horsepower really shows when you are making system changes; reboots are faster and RAID rebuild is faster.  Most of the menus will respond similar to other products in the QNAP lineup, mainly because the interface is light to begin with.  Also, having the extra processing power is a necessity in an environment that will be taxing the NAS in different ways such as a larger user base accessing the NAS and having the NAS perform FTP, encoding tasks, iSCSI, and hosting your intranet site at the same time.  The QNAP software is constant across the brand and that familiarity really lends to the usability of the product.  When you start adding things like flexibility and security into the equation, you might find yourself with a hard product to beat.  Overall, the TS-879U-RP delivers in all the ways I expected it to, from build quality to usability.  If your business is looking for a reliable NAS, start moving QNAP up on the list... and put the TS-879U-RP at the top.

Again, when you are consistent in your product, you will be consistent in its reception.  Therefore...

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Joe DiFiglia has written 226 Articles at C.O.D.


In early 2000 I became increasingly frustrated with hardware review sites praising less than satisfactory products. The saying: “if you want something done right, do it yourself” applies here. I wasn’t satisfied, so I did it myself; and here we are years later.