QNAP TS-453B 4-Bay NAS

[crmaris]

The TS-453B is a feature-rich four-bay NAS that includes an OLED screen, 4K playback, HDMI port, and a PCIe expansion port for QNAP's QM2 expansion boards. Using various cards, you can add up to two M.2 slots and 10 Gigabit networking to the NAS, in addition to the two 1000 Mb/s ports.

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[FreedomEclipse]

Upgraded to a Qnap over a month ago and the boot times can be a lot better.... I wonder if having an SSD for caching will help it boot faster? I would test this but my NAS is only two bay

 

[bug]

Ah, NAS. The gadget I'm always keeping an eye on to move my mechanical drives to. And never get around to actually buying one.

 

[crmaris]

an SSD drive working as cache doesn't offer a faster boot, unfortunately. The SSD cache is mostly used for faster network transfer speeds.

 

[TheLostSwede]

The problem is QNAP's software design. They're slowly moving to eMMC, but it still contains a compressed OS image that's installed onto too hard drives during the initial setup. Booting from hard drives is slow and even slower on NAS appliances for some reason. Instead, the OS should run straight from the eMMC which should help improve boot times significantly. Obviously this isn't possible on models using a USB DOM for the is OS image. Then again, how often do you restart your NAS?

 

[Octavean]

Exactly, since rebooting the NAS should be done sparingly the reboot speed shouldn't be too much of an issue.

QTS looks a lot like the Linux version that Synology uses with their DSM OS. If they act similarly then the OS is copied to all HDDs that have been initialized in the NAS. This is likely done for redundancy purposes and makes a lot of sense IMO. It's reasonable to lose some speed when booting / rebooting to gain some degree of redundancy.

These types of NAS units generally are not considered setup until the latest version of the OS has been downloaded and installed which again requires the initalization of at least one HDD.

For increased speed one could always populate the NAS entirely with SSDs but that would be expensive and likely would limit the capacity.

I personally would like to have one of these QNAP NAS units with HDMI so I could run Plex directly rather then over a network. However, I would want at least a NAS with 8 bays.

Currently I have a Synology DS1815+ NAS which is a fairly good product. I proactively RMAed the unit and received a new model manufactured in May 2017 according to the serial number: 175xxxxxx. This was done to sidestep the Intel Atom C2000 series errata that could brick the NAS with ~18 months.

 

[ERazer]

seems likes its cheaper building ur own NAS from old computers like Unraid/FreeNas

 

[FreedomEclipse]

seems likes its cheaper building ur own NAS from old computers like Unraid/FreeNas

Depends if you have a spare itx setup and a raid card lying around in your old computer pile.

One of the beauties of most NAS units is they are very small and compact so easy to tuck and hide away somewhere.

 

[ERazer]

Depends if you have a spare itx setup and a raid card lying around in your old computer pile.

One of the beauties of most NAS units is they are very small and compact so easy to tuck and hide away somewhere.

cant say about freenas but with UnRaid no need for raid card when you just starting up just use mobo sata ports and you can use any drive sizes as long its not bigger than parity drive.

and you can do this:

 

[FreedomEclipse]

cant say about freenas but with UnRaid no need for raid card when you just starting up just use mobo sata ports and you can use any drive sizes as long its not bigger than parity drive.

and you can do this:

Oh yeah. Totally forgot about Unraid. doesnt software raid require more resources though compared to hardware raid???

On a side note

I love this.