4.0 out of 5 stars
Good performance NAS for advanced home user or SMB
Reviewed in the United States on 18 January 2018
This is a new, late 2017 / early 2018 rack mount NAS that I have purchased. The unit arrived in a cardboard box with two styrofoam for protection. Nothing fancy. It came with the rack mount kits which fits the standard 19" rack with two puller that you can easily mount and dismount from the rack. I paired this NAS with four, 4TB Western Digital NAS drives. Installation was a snap but took overnight to fully initialize the whole setup to RAID 5 with encryption enabled. The fans are very good quality and low noise level.
The QTS (QNAP's own OS) contains many features that are so useful, such as VPN (known as QVPN) servers, which can do PPTP, OpenVPN, and L2TP. Surveillance Station that can act as a NVR with two licenses. You have to pay more if you want more cameras to be attached to the NVR which costs around $70 each, which is a bit pricey but you only have to pay once. QNAP has its own app store and more of them are free to download and use. The learning curve is not steep at all but it does require some fundamental technical knowledge as far as networking and storage terminology. Once you get everything setup, you can leave it as it and forget about it.
I do not have a SFP+ in my network but the two 1GB NICs are fast enough. It has four USB ports which can attach an external drive, or UPS for monitoring purpose with it.
This is a rack mount model, for $550, you can't beat that, especially for its features and small foot print (1U with 12" depth). So, why 4 stars and not 5? There are some areas that should be obvious and not expensive to add on. For instance, at least one of the USB ports can be put on the front for easy access. Why put all 4 in the back? Also, the unit only has 4 HD status, 2 NIC and 1 SFP+ indicator. It'd be super helpful to put a small message enabled display at the front to show relevant NAS info. I also own a QNAP TS-453 Pro and it has all that but it's getting old though, so I upgraded to a newer model.
Useful tips: Buy the base model with 2 GB installed and not replace it with a 8gig RAM yourself. If you purchase a 8 GBs RAM installed model, it'd cost $150 more, are you kidding me? You can purchase a 8 GB RAM for less than $40 if you shop around, and it doesn't take much efforts to install it. I have attached some pictures for your reference.
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Product Update 1: 1/29/2018 -
A week after I got this NAS, I noticed that the the remote backup app, named Hybrid Backup app did not work. The symptom was like this, when I attempted to make backup from my new NAS to the old one, I was unable to use the drop down menu to select my old NAS, given that they are in the same subnet. However, if I remove Hybrid Sync app, I was able to use the good old backup/restore app to do scheduled remote backup. I contacted QNAP support a couple of times about this symptom, the first tech I talked to, said I was using a non-supported memory module, which I knew that it was a complete BS. I then talked to the second tech, he, just like the first tech, did several TeamViewer remote session and couldn't figure it out. As of today, there was a release of new Hybrid Sync app, which has fixed this bug instantaneously. Therefore, I feel that the QNAP techs were not informed about this bug or there was an internal communication problem. Should this bugs been caught or flagged, the tech would not have to give the caller run-around. All they had to do, is to report the bug to the development team and debug it. It's a bit frustrating about this little episode but other than that, this unit has still been working great and stable. No other issues spotted so far.
Product Update 2: 3/6/2018 -
The system has been extremely stable. The only time that I had to restart it, was due to firmware upgrade which restart is always mandatory. I noticed that the restart time can range from 10 to 17 minutes, which was significantly longer than my Intel Celeron based 453-Pro. Last but not least, although the unit has three ventilation fans, it tends to warm up quite a bit if stacked on top of another 1U network unit. It's good idea to leave some space (1/2 U maybe?) on the top of the NAS, which will help to ventilate better.
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