QNAP

Its a Good NAS On Paper But Limited Performance – This 4-bay unit comes in at around the same price as most 2-bay units with a lot of extra features that bring it into the modern world. There's dual… Read more

slots of DDR4 SODIMM RAM (expandable to 16GB), dual slots for NVME SSDs (Gen 3x1), dual 2.5G LAN ports (backwards compatible), PCIe slot for expansion, dual USB3.2 Gen 2 ports, HDMI 2.1 out (4K). The unit is quite compact and fairly stylish and wouldn't look out of place next to a PC or on a TV unit.

With all this good stuff you might have been thinking what's the down side? I'm glad you asked! 1. The unit (depending on whether you opt for the 4GB or 2GB RAM) comes with either 4GB soldered (not expandable) or 2GB (removable and able to be upgraded to 16GB. The 2GB included would barely run anything so it would have been better to just supply as a bare bones NAS and chuck in whatever you like. I put 2x8GB Kingston's in here and it runs well. 2. Dual NVMEs - Great except they only use one lane and limited to 1000Mb/s. So no use putting any high end SSDs like Samsung EVOs and the like that transfer at 5000Mb/s 3. SSD storage is still expensive past 2TB so not a really good choice as storage, but good for accelerated cache and App storage. As you don't need much storage for cache a 500GB SSD and if you want to store personal files then maybe a 2TB in the other slot. 4. 2.5G Ethernet again is still relatively expensive for the other networking requirements (Routers, switch, PC adapters etc). So unless you already have that in place you'll have to fork out for these to take advantage of the higher transfer speeds. 5. Dual USB2.0 ports - why is this still a thing in 2023/2024 putting USB2.0 connections on anything? At a minimum it should be USB3.x of some description. It doesn't cost any extra and realistically once setup, you're probably not going to attach keyboards etc. You're more likely to attach external drives where you'll want that extra speed. 6. It only comes with an older (2021) dual core CPU N4505. Although it has burst speeds up to 2.9Ghz, it's base speed is 2GHz. Its a good processor for general media streaming and file serving but going to be a bit limited if you want to try and run virtual machines on this. Having the SSDs will help speed things up a bit.

Now for the nitty gritty. To setup, you'll need to install either some HDDs or an SSD so the OS has somewhere to write to. Remember the SSD slots? Well you can install the OS and apps to that (I installed a crucial 500GB SSD and installing the apps to that and using the other half for cache). To install HDDs, QNAPs come with their no tool plastic caddies. Just take the side clips off, put the HDD in the caddy, attach the side clips again and slot them into the unit. The plastic caddies aren't bad and help stop HDD vibration (The TS-453D uses them as well and I haven't had issues with it.

As with most QNAP products it comes with QNAPs QTS operating system. Its easy to use and get set up. One good thing I noticed was the Admin account now gets turned off after you create a local account to stop hackers from trying to access while initially setting it up. The HDMI port with a keyboard/mouse attached is relatively useless when it comes to setting the unit up as they don't work well at this stage. You'll still need to just boot it up headless and use Qfinder to locate the allocated IP and login that way to setup. Once it's all running, it comes with some pre-installed Apps to help you get started. Some I would also install is the firewall app and QuBoost. Don't bother with Qsync as it's a terrible backup App and you're likely to loose files between your PC and the NAS. There's also a package for most media streaming Apps (like Plex, Emby and Jellyfin). And that's about it - there's plenty of tutorials on YT on how to setup QTS and using QNAPs apps.

Once setup, you can attach this to a TV via the HDMI port and also connect a USB wireless keyboard/mouse/air mouse to control it as a media player. QNAP also sell remotes for a lot of their NAS products as well.

My final thoughts: Its a good unit for general file serving and media streaming although the CPU is maybe a little under powered for anything other than this. The 2GB RAM is way too low to do anything useful with and you'll need to shlll out for extra memory straight away. Don't buy the 4GB solder in unit - waist of money and defeats the purpose. The dual NVMEs are a welcome inclusion although limited (1000Mb/s). USB2.0 on any hardware in 2023+ is just plain lazy. Nice compact unit and wouldn't be out of place sitting next to the TV or in a media unit.

Edit: Follow up review - A few things I've found out about the unit and it's performance as I've used it. While on paper the specs seem to read excellent - in real work scenario's it definitely lacks performance. - You'll definitely want to upgrade the RAM. I put in two 4GB modules which was fairly easy to do with the HDD's removed. - Transfer speeds: While it has a 2.5G LAN connection, in use it can barely keep up with gigabit (1G) speeds. I'm not sure whether it's the disks but hypothesising that it's more than likely the internal BUS limitations (more later). So transferring files via LAN should in theory give around 2.5G (250MB/s) speeds. In practical use it's more like 80-90MB/s consistently. I also tried formatting the volumes in different styles (thick/thin as I have on my TS453D) which also made very little difference. It's actually faster to copy your files to an external HDD, then plug that into the unit and transfer again LOL. Which leads me to believe it might not be the drive or bus speeds but the 2.5G connection itself. - Internal SSD: I installed an SSD to use as I thought it would speed the unit up. Configuring as a system drive to run the OS and apps worked well enough. But switching to use as a cache (to speed up transfers) proved pointless as transfers where still as slow as not using the SSD cache at all and only the 4 drive RAID. After doing some reading, the internal M.2 slot is limited to PCIe Gen 3×1 (so maximum transfer rates of 1000Mbit/s for the whole system - not just the M2 slot but the system as a whole). So while transferring files, the system also uses these PCI lanes for system resources further reducing the SSD effective speed. And while I also added a heat-sink to the SSD, it still overheated after 1-2 minutes of constant data writing and was then throttled using as a cache. Personally, I'm reluctant to recommend the unit now. Even with it's cheap price, for the performance you're better off getting a better model. As it stands I only use it as an offline storage device and switch it on once every couple of months to transfer a few hundred files off an external HDD.

Very Good BUT Backward & Ancient – Great quality hardware for all hardware levels, entry to small business, at fair prices. Build is excellent, performance as good as and sometimes… Read more

better than the competition. However, the setup process should be streamlined for novice (home) users to a better degree than what the company does at present - especially disapointing from QNAP given 'setup Wizards' have been around for years and QNAP doesn't use them properly for beginners.

The biggest letdown for QNAP is their 'File Station' tool in their Operating System, QTS.... If you want to go back to the 90s and sample how file management was done back then you can look no further than using QNAPS QTS via a remote login from your web browser. It is not a good experience - To be honest, it is very poor ! QNAP please spend some time improving this vital tool !!