I know this is a common kind of complaint under these reviews; but I often poke at NAS reviews as something that would be a nice-to-have, and then can't get myself to read past the price tag. I know these aren't really home devices. But aren't there multi-bay (4+) NAS systems with, say, an arm, for less than 300$?
A quick search on Amazon and Google shows that there are a number of entry level 4 bay NASes for $250-300. Filtering solely by brand name, the $282 QNAP TS-431 would be my initial recommendation. Synology, the other nas maker (along with QNAP) with what's generally regarded as top flight software wants over a hundred more for the DS414j; which appears to be their cheapest 4x3.5" drive model.
I own a T-431 and so I'm always interested in these reviews because I find there isn't that many NAS reviews around. This particular review seems way more advanced then what I actually do with mine. I use mine to download/seed torrents and hold my Library of content which I access from several devices. I also really like the personal cloud features. I was worried when I bought my unit that the RAM and processor would be a major issue but it never lags. I'm not sure how it could get any better really. I think this must be because I am not using it as a typical NAS user? Anyway, all this to say, the TS-431 is the best gadget purchase I have ever made, I really do love it.
You could build a dedicated NAS for less than 300$ with the capability of 4+ drives. It is easy, and you may already have the parts. The question is do you NEED 4 drives? Why don't you get basic 1 drive unit and test if you need one. If you love it but still want redundancy you can later upgrade.
With all the consolidation in the hard disk industry, I think the price curve is still somewhat dominated by the cost of 4 hard drives with TLER support. 3 TB NAS drives are somewhat affordable, but 4 TB is still a bit pricey in my opinion even for consumer NAS drives. "Enterprise" SATA drives are flat out pricey at higher capacities, because the last few manufacturers can absolutely get away with it.
The QNAP TS-451 (apparently now an older model) was on sale numerous times over the past 12 months for $350 + tax. I think that's a pretty attractive price point considering the performance. IIRC, Synology's somewhat comparable units were at least $100 higher although until recently DSM had always been favored by reviewers.
The sale price may have been in anticipation of the release of the TS-451+ but since it happened somewhat frequently over the course of an entire year-long period, it was a commonly available deal here in the U.S. Not sure how aggressive QNAP will be for the year ahead though.
One feature that I really want to see is Sync to OneDrive and other cloud providers. These days a lot of these services offer unlimited or incredibly large backups for free, and being able to sync to them frees a SOHO environment from having to find an offsite backup solution.
This has been available since the most recent firmware upgrade.....sync to most cloud services like google drive etc.....not 100% on one drive but I'm guessing unless Microsoft doest have an api for it you can do it with qnap
I know this review didn't go into QTS much but I thought I'd ask a related question. Is there any way for QTS 4.2 to support shadow copy, or previous versions in windows? I picked up the 2 bay model for my parents hoping to use it as a backup for them. I wanted to use snapshots and shadow copy. I've got snapshots running but can't seem to get it to support shadow copies on networked files. Surely a NAS would support this?
I think network file VSS support was only just introduced with Windows Server 2012 R2. Otherwise you only have local volume support. But you should be able to get it working if you can connect it as an iSCSI LUN.
Not at this pricepoint/market segment. The J1900 doesn't support it. You need to step up from prosumer to small/medium enterprise level hardware for ECC. QNAP apparently doesn't offer ECC in anything below an 8bay model.
Can someone explain to me why basic NAS like this are $650. It makes no sense. You could easily build a box that would have far more processing power, with an awesome raid controller, for less than this. Only advantage i can see would be size?
It is expensive because it's ready go to solution. You throw HDDs into that, spend 30 minutes with setup /install and that's it. You also have option to contact customer support if something goes wrong.
Your own solution might be much better / cheaper but it requires knowledge / experience to put together hardware parts, install NAS OS and make it all work. There is no customer support, you are on your own.
That definitely makes sense. I always forget about the customer support angle because i don't even remember the last time i had to do customer support for any piece of hardware ever. Not trying to toot my own horn, but thats part of the fun of being a hardware enthusiast.
You also pay for the software. I own a Synology DS415+ and use it (apart from the usual NAS stuff) for a OpenVPN Server, Docker with Jenkins, Download Station and have mobile apps available. A quite good backup software is already included and you have set that stuff up (well, apart from a robust, secure OpenVPN, which takes a bit longer) in a matter of minutes. Relatively sophisticated security / logging mechanisms are also included. I don't even want to imagine how long that stuff would take me with a self built NAS. I rather spend 100-200$ more and have a very good and versatile NAS than spend weeks fiddling around with linux. If you are up for it, go for it. For me, it was a no-brainer.
If you look at Amazon reviews you will find that there is no customer support for a NAS either. At least with off the shelf parts if your power brick fails you can just buy another one. If your proprietary Netgear power brick fails you are facing hours on a premium rate phone line as they don't respond to web requests.
I never got over the pricing either, and went the WHS route. I started out with a machine built with spare parts 6 years ago, and added hard drives to the system as I went, and now have 9 drives in it. I use Stablebit drivepool for drive pooling and redundancy, which I like better than using RAID. It started out with a Sempron processor which was fine in the beginning, but upgraded to a core i5 Devil's Canyon so I could run several minecraft servers. Too bad they stopped support for WHS. I'll probably just move to Windows 10 in the future.
That's a list price. The predecessor (the 451 non plus - essentially the same but with a 2.4ghz dual core instead of this 2ghz quad core) sells in the 300 (great sale) to 450 range. Amazon already lists the 451+ at 529 for the 2gig memory model.
If size doesn't matter, and you're up to the task on the software side, then yeah, you can make something better for the same money. Or do it slightly cheaper. And I've done that many times with HP Microservers, and might again with a Fractal Design 304 case. But if it's not your expertise or your time is better spent elsewhere, these turnkey solutions are great. Qnap and Synology have a lot of applets, and now even the ability to run a VM for additional wants.
Article mentions raid rebuild is fast but if I'm reading it right rebuilds take 8 hours plus! Why do they (all) take so long? QNAP needs to support btrfs or ZfS so we can have a file system that properly protects against file corruption not just disk failure.
An important and oft-overlooked issue with most home NAS units (QNAP, Drobo, Synology) is that if your unit dies out of warranty, that's it -- these companies offer no repair option or support.
This is a problem with Drobo especially because they use a proprietary file system. You can of course buy another unit, if available, and move the drives over, or buy a newer model and hope for turnkey compatibility.
With a custom home NAS, well within the capabilities (if not spare time) of most Anandtech readers, you can upgrade and repair parts easily.
Linux based NASes - like almost everything but the Drobo - use standard Filesystems, and can be recovered by sticking the drives in a normal Linux box.
It isn't much better if they die in warranty. All NAS makers have dire reviews for customer support. Netgear has a premium number for support and a healthy queue length (30-60 minutes this morning) to maximise revenue.
We've been running a QNAP box that's extremely similar to this one in our office for the last couple of years, and I have to say we're extremely happy with it. We use it as an online archive of completed projects that have already been backed up, so it doesn't get a huge amount of use, but it probably shunts a terabyte or two around every week. My one criticism is that it feels like every time I log onto the admin console via a web browser it asks to install a new firmware update, but I can put up with this (mainly by not needing to log in that often).
"For the TS-451+ to become a compelling choice, the pricing aspect needs to be addressed."
You aren't kidding. I recently put together a comparable Braswell (N3700) system for under $250. And the Braswell SoC's feature AES NI, 4K and HEVC. Yikes! Between the anemic warranties and the severely underpowered and/or overpriced hardware I'm just not seeing the value in these proprietary SOHO NAS boxes. Is it really so hard to jam PLEX/Kodi/Samba on an Ubuntu server these days? And no need to jump through hoops to "use it like a PC" because it is a PC.
As an existing QNAP user, I don't know how any QNAP NAS's can be seriously considered for any awards, nor why they do so well on reviews.
They entice buyers with fancy options, but are not interested in developing applications users need.
SVN (Subversion Source Control) is the most popular and source control software in use, yet QNAP have been promising a proper SVN-server application since 2009, and still not delivered! How can users take them seriously - they're obviously not interested in developing applications the community needs, only the minimum needed to trick buyers into purchasing and evaluators to award prizes. They claim you can install SVN by an outdated method - which is very risky and outdated by a few years, and in my experience does not work at all.
They have a GIT client, so can claim they "have" source control applications. But no SVN support. Their marketing department needs to kick the development team into gear.
Don't try to use this device as a standalone windows domain controller. The SAMBA and DHCP implementations are missing two CRITICAL components for it to work.
Samba is missing the ability to do DNS Forwarders...and DHCP does not allow you to input the OPTIONS command. Both of these functions are critical to having a working solution. If you want a standalone MS Domain Controller that works. Look elsewhere.
I noticed the model tested was the 8GB. Any sense of how the performance would compare to the 2GB? For example, I noticed the Synology DS415+ was very close in the performance, but only has 2GB. Would the 2GB version of the QNAP TS-451+ perform as well compared to the Synology DS415+?
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ant6n - Thursday, October 29, 2015 - link
I know this is a common kind of complaint under these reviews; but I often poke at NAS reviews as something that would be a nice-to-have, and then can't get myself to read past the price tag. I know these aren't really home devices. But aren't there multi-bay (4+) NAS systems with, say, an arm, for less than 300$?DanNeely - Thursday, October 29, 2015 - link
A quick search on Amazon and Google shows that there are a number of entry level 4 bay NASes for $250-300. Filtering solely by brand name, the $282 QNAP TS-431 would be my initial recommendation. Synology, the other nas maker (along with QNAP) with what's generally regarded as top flight software wants over a hundred more for the DS414j; which appears to be their cheapest 4x3.5" drive model.Savardm - Thursday, October 29, 2015 - link
I own a T-431 and so I'm always interested in these reviews because I find there isn't that many NAS reviews around. This particular review seems way more advanced then what I actually do with mine. I use mine to download/seed torrents and hold my Library of content which I access from several devices. I also really like the personal cloud features. I was worried when I bought my unit that the RAM and processor would be a major issue but it never lags. I'm not sure how it could get any better really. I think this must be because I am not using it as a typical NAS user? Anyway, all this to say, the TS-431 is the best gadget purchase I have ever made, I really do love it.ivyanev - Friday, October 30, 2015 - link
You could build a dedicated NAS for less than 300$ with the capability of 4+ drives. It is easy, and you may already have the parts. The question is do you NEED 4 drives? Why don't you get basic 1 drive unit and test if you need one. If you love it but still want redundancy you can later upgrade.random2 - Wednesday, November 4, 2015 - link
"Why don't you get basic 1 drive unit and test if you need one."Oh, you mean an external drive? I think you might be missing the whole point of redundant storage.
Moishe - Wednesday, November 4, 2015 - link
The cost is certainly high for a diskless system. Crazy.manly - Monday, November 23, 2015 - link
With all the consolidation in the hard disk industry, I think the price curve is still somewhat dominated by the cost of 4 hard drives with TLER support. 3 TB NAS drives are somewhat affordable, but 4 TB is still a bit pricey in my opinion even for consumer NAS drives. "Enterprise" SATA drives are flat out pricey at higher capacities, because the last few manufacturers can absolutely get away with it.The QNAP TS-451 (apparently now an older model) was on sale numerous times over the past 12 months for $350 + tax. I think that's a pretty attractive price point considering the performance. IIRC, Synology's somewhat comparable units were at least $100 higher although until recently DSM had always been favored by reviewers.
The sale price may have been in anticipation of the release of the TS-451+ but since it happened somewhat frequently over the course of an entire year-long period, it was a commonly available deal here in the U.S. Not sure how aggressive QNAP will be for the year ahead though.
Dunkurs1987 - Tuesday, January 5, 2016 - link
This is the price you can expect from 8GB version. There is 2GB option available too. Should be ok with limited tasks.http://www.span.com/product/Qnap-Desktop-NAS-TS-45...
Der2 - Thursday, October 29, 2015 - link
Very nice NAS review.Reflex - Thursday, October 29, 2015 - link
One feature that I really want to see is Sync to OneDrive and other cloud providers. These days a lot of these services offer unlimited or incredibly large backups for free, and being able to sync to them frees a SOHO environment from having to find an offsite backup solution.Brianbeastsu - Thursday, November 26, 2015 - link
This has been available since the most recent firmware upgrade.....sync to most cloud services like google drive etc.....not 100% on one drive but I'm guessing unless Microsoft doest have an api for it you can do it with qnapShambles31 - Thursday, October 29, 2015 - link
I know this review didn't go into QTS much but I thought I'd ask a related question. Is there any way for QTS 4.2 to support shadow copy, or previous versions in windows? I picked up the 2 bay model for my parents hoping to use it as a backup for them. I wanted to use snapshots and shadow copy. I've got snapshots running but can't seem to get it to support shadow copies on networked files. Surely a NAS would support this?Minion4Hire - Friday, October 30, 2015 - link
I think network file VSS support was only just introduced with Windows Server 2012 R2. Otherwise you only have local volume support. But you should be able to get it working if you can connect it as an iSCSI LUN.kgardas - Thursday, October 29, 2015 - link
Does it support ECC RAM? IMHO a must have for such NAS...DanNeely - Thursday, October 29, 2015 - link
Not at this pricepoint/market segment. The J1900 doesn't support it. You need to step up from prosumer to small/medium enterprise level hardware for ECC. QNAP apparently doesn't offer ECC in anything below an 8bay model.mcveigh - Thursday, October 29, 2015 - link
Any comments on the remote? How was it's build quality?Kutark - Friday, October 30, 2015 - link
Can someone explain to me why basic NAS like this are $650. It makes no sense. You could easily build a box that would have far more processing power, with an awesome raid controller, for less than this. Only advantage i can see would be size?milkod2001 - Friday, October 30, 2015 - link
It is expensive because it's ready go to solution. You throw HDDs into that, spend 30 minutes with setup /install and that's it. You also have option to contact customer support if something goes wrong.Your own solution might be much better / cheaper but it requires knowledge / experience to put together hardware parts, install NAS OS and make it all work. There is no customer support, you are on your own.
Kutark - Friday, October 30, 2015 - link
That definitely makes sense. I always forget about the customer support angle because i don't even remember the last time i had to do customer support for any piece of hardware ever. Not trying to toot my own horn, but thats part of the fun of being a hardware enthusiast.Chloiber - Saturday, October 31, 2015 - link
You also pay for the software. I own a Synology DS415+ and use it (apart from the usual NAS stuff) for a OpenVPN Server, Docker with Jenkins, Download Station and have mobile apps available. A quite good backup software is already included and you have set that stuff up (well, apart from a robust, secure OpenVPN, which takes a bit longer) in a matter of minutes. Relatively sophisticated security / logging mechanisms are also included. I don't even want to imagine how long that stuff would take me with a self built NAS. I rather spend 100-200$ more and have a very good and versatile NAS than spend weeks fiddling around with linux.If you are up for it, go for it. For me, it was a no-brainer.
BedfordTim - Friday, February 19, 2016 - link
If you look at Amazon reviews you will find that there is no customer support for a NAS either. At least with off the shelf parts if your power brick fails you can just buy another one. If your proprietary Netgear power brick fails you are facing hours on a premium rate phone line as they don't respond to web requests.kmmatney - Sunday, November 1, 2015 - link
I never got over the pricing either, and went the WHS route. I started out with a machine built with spare parts 6 years ago, and added hard drives to the system as I went, and now have 9 drives in it. I use Stablebit drivepool for drive pooling and redundancy, which I like better than using RAID. It started out with a Sempron processor which was fine in the beginning, but upgraded to a core i5 Devil's Canyon so I could run several minecraft servers. Too bad they stopped support for WHS. I'll probably just move to Windows 10 in the future.bsd228 - Friday, November 6, 2015 - link
That's a list price. The predecessor (the 451 non plus - essentially the same but with a 2.4ghz dual core instead of this 2ghz quad core) sells in the 300 (great sale) to 450 range. Amazon already lists the 451+ at 529 for the 2gig memory model.If size doesn't matter, and you're up to the task on the software side, then yeah, you can make something better for the same money. Or do it slightly cheaper. And I've done that many times with HP Microservers, and might again with a Fractal Design 304 case. But if it's not your expertise or your time is better spent elsewhere, these turnkey solutions are great. Qnap and Synology have a lot of applets, and now even the ability to run a VM for additional wants.
Oscarcharliezulu - Friday, October 30, 2015 - link
Article mentions raid rebuild is fast but if I'm reading it right rebuilds take 8 hours plus! Why do they (all) take so long? QNAP needs to support btrfs or ZfS so we can have a file system that properly protects against file corruption not just disk failure.Sivar - Friday, October 30, 2015 - link
An important and oft-overlooked issue with most home NAS units (QNAP, Drobo, Synology) is that if your unit dies out of warranty, that's it -- these companies offer no repair option or support.This is a problem with Drobo especially because they use a proprietary file system. You can of course buy another unit, if available, and move the drives over, or buy a newer model and hope for turnkey compatibility.
With a custom home NAS, well within the capabilities (if not spare time) of most Anandtech readers, you can upgrade and repair parts easily.
DanNeely - Friday, October 30, 2015 - link
Linux based NASes - like almost everything but the Drobo - use standard Filesystems, and can be recovered by sticking the drives in a normal Linux box.BedfordTim - Friday, February 19, 2016 - link
It isn't much better if they die in warranty. All NAS makers have dire reviews for customer support. Netgear has a premium number for support and a healthy queue length (30-60 minutes this morning) to maximise revenue.Navvie - Monday, November 2, 2015 - link
What would be nice is a comparison with a roll-your-own NAS solution. For example, a HP Microserver G2020T running FreeNAS or nas4free.colonelclaw - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link
We've been running a QNAP box that's extremely similar to this one in our office for the last couple of years, and I have to say we're extremely happy with it. We use it as an online archive of completed projects that have already been backed up, so it doesn't get a huge amount of use, but it probably shunts a terabyte or two around every week.My one criticism is that it feels like every time I log onto the admin console via a web browser it asks to install a new firmware update, but I can put up with this (mainly by not needing to log in that often).
akdubya - Wednesday, November 4, 2015 - link
"For the TS-451+ to become a compelling choice, the pricing aspect needs to be addressed."You aren't kidding. I recently put together a comparable Braswell (N3700) system for under $250. And the Braswell SoC's feature AES NI, 4K and HEVC. Yikes! Between the anemic warranties and the severely underpowered and/or overpriced hardware I'm just not seeing the value in these proprietary SOHO NAS boxes. Is it really so hard to jam PLEX/Kodi/Samba on an Ubuntu server these days? And no need to jump through hoops to "use it like a PC" because it is a PC.
mwituni - Thursday, November 19, 2015 - link
As an existing QNAP user, I don't know how any QNAP NAS's can be seriously considered for any awards, nor why they do so well on reviews.They entice buyers with fancy options, but are not interested in developing applications users need.
SVN (Subversion Source Control) is the most popular and source control software in use, yet QNAP have been promising a proper SVN-server application since 2009, and still not delivered! How can users take them seriously - they're obviously not interested in developing applications the community needs, only the minimum needed to trick buyers into purchasing and evaluators to award prizes. They claim you can install SVN by an outdated method - which is very risky and outdated by a few years, and in my experience does not work at all.
They have a GIT client, so can claim they "have" source control applications. But no SVN support.
Their marketing department needs to kick the development team into gear.
krazyderek - Sunday, January 10, 2016 - link
maybe you should should join everyone else and switch to GIT ;) https://git-scm.com/book/en/v1/Git-and-Other-Syste...gnalley - Saturday, January 23, 2016 - link
Don't try to use this device as a standalone windows domain controller. The SAMBA and DHCP implementations are missing two CRITICAL components for it to work.Samba is missing the ability to do DNS Forwarders...and DHCP does not allow you to input the OPTIONS command. Both of these functions are critical to having a working solution. If you want a standalone MS Domain Controller that works. Look elsewhere.
StaksOnStaks - Wednesday, June 1, 2016 - link
I noticed the model tested was the 8GB. Any sense of how the performance would compare to the 2GB? For example, I noticed the Synology DS415+ was very close in the performance, but only has 2GB. Would the 2GB version of the QNAP TS-451+ perform as well compared to the Synology DS415+?