Preparing the Hard Drives 

First of all, we had to get ourselves 4 hard drives. Yes, that's right, the QNAP TS-409 does not come with any hard drives. This is the only negative point, as this will increase the total cost of your NAS solution quite considerably.

We decided to use 4 x 500Gb Western Digital SE16 hard drives. These drives contains 16Mb cache and spins at a nippy 7,200rpm ... so, as far as performance is concerned, they should be more than enough.