Gibbs takes a look at a new QNAP NAS devices but his 2Wire DSL gateway doesn't help

Network World - "Currently 2Wire does not support Universal Plug and Play (UPnP). 2Wire customizes all gateway products and software to meet the requirements of our ISP partners. If supporting UPNP became a requirement, 2Wire will include the functionality to the system. UPNP allows the OS to control the firewall configuration that could have an adverse effect on any systems running behind a firewall that is being controlled by malicious software operating on a LAN-based computer."

Tell me, who writes this stuff? The above is quoted from 2Wire's so-called Gateway Product Support page that you get to by clicking on the Help link on the management interface of a 2Wire 2701HG-B Gateway as supplied by AT&T. Yes, I know it's an old model (really slow with some horrible user interface bugs), but these devices are still out there by the thousands so they are, unfortunately, relevant.

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What is so annoying about this "explanation" (other than the text being written by someone who was obviously semi-literate) is they don't just come out and say "no"; they beat about the bush, push the issue in the direction of the ISP, and then imply it's a bad idea altogether. Really? Shame on you, 2Wire.

Anyway, I stumbled across this nonsense while setting up a new toy, er, product here in the Gibbs Universal Industries Secret Underground Bunker, a QNAP TS-1079 Pro.

The QNAP TS-1079 Pro is a network-attached storage (NAS) device with 10 SATA drive bays that can provide up to 30TB of storage in an office-friendly package. I say "office friendly" because its noise emission is rated at a reasonable 30db in the configuration I have, which is with 10 1TB drives.

Powered by a Dual Core Intel Core i3-2120 3.3 GHz processor with 2GB DDR3 RAM, the QNAP TS-1079 Pro comes with two 1Gb Ethernet ports as standard, two USB 3.0 ports, four USB 2.0 ports and two eSATA ports. Roughly toaster-oven size (9 inches high, 13 inches wide, 13 inches deep) it consumes (again, in my configuration) 121 watts in operation and 40 W on standby.

You can configure the QNAP TS-1079 Pro to be a single giant disk volume, a number of single disk volumes, a single RAID 0 striping disk volume, one or more RAID 1 mirroring disk volumes, a RAID 5 disk volume, a RAID 6 disk volume or a RAID 10 disk volume.

So, where to begin with features? This is tricky because this system is loaded.

Perhaps a good place is the reason I was checking to see if my Internet gateway was UPnP-enabled: This was because the TS-1079 supports a service called MyCloudNAS.