Network Settings

Since we have extensively covered the QTS Administration Interface in our TS-451 review, we will only mention its most important settings here.


The Network group gives you access to all TCP/IP settings, where you can enable Port Trunking mode. You should enable the respective option to provide a higher bandwidth between the NAS and Ethernet switch if the latter supports Link Aggregation. LACP obviously requires multiple Ethernet cables for connectivity to all NAS ports. Another important option is Jumbo Frames, a reference to Ethernet frames that are larger than 1500 bytes. Jumbo Frames is designed to boost networking throughput and reduce CPU utilization on large-file transfers by allowing larger payloads per packet. But there is a catch as the Jumbo Frames setting only applies to Gigabit network environments and all connected clients must enable the option with exactly the same MTU value for a performance boost.


You had better assign a static IP to the NAS. Most often required by the router, it is a requisite if you want to set-up the NAS' firewall/NAT rules.


You should enable the file service for Microsoft networking if you want the NAS to be s part of such a compatible network. You also have the ability to set the NAS up as a domain controller.

Shared Folders

You will definitely have to familiarize yourself with the Shared Folder menu since it is crucial to the security of all files stored on the NAS. This menu will allow you to create new shared folders for users and user groups, or edit access permissions on already existing shared folders.


You have to active the quest account option if you want a folder to be accessible by anyone. This option is deactivated by default.

Telnet / SSH

All Telnet and SSH service options can be found in this menu. Most advanced users are probably familiar with the Linux operating system and will, as such, enable the above services in order to access the QTS console.

Once you enable the above services, you can use a free program like PuTTY to access the console for many interesting options you cannot implement through QTS's graphical interface, like increased RAID rebuilding and synchronization speeds.

It will take a while for a RAID array to full synchronize the first time you create it, and rebuild times are equally long should something go wrong or a disk fail since minimum RAID construction speeds are by default set to a mere 5MB/s to keep CPU utilization equally low, which will keep the NAS snappy. If you want to speed things up little bit, you can increase the threshold to 30MB/s or even more, but keep in mind that all other services will slow down since the CPU will dedicate most of its resources to the RAID synchronization procedure.


Through PuTTY, send the following command to check the current min speed limit: cat /proc/sys/dev/raid/speed_limit_min

To increase speeds to 45MB/s, type the following into the console: echo 45000 >/proc/sys/dev/raid/speed_limit_min.


To monitor the RAID sync or rebuilding procedure in more details, use the following command: cat /proc/mdstat.

To make RAID reconstruction speed changes permanent, you must put and save the command line to "autostart.sh", or the speed_limit_min value will drop to the default 5 MB/s after each reboot. An easy-to-use editor QNAP includes with the NAS is "nano".

External Devices

All connected external storage disks, USB printers, and UPS devices can be configured through these options.

System Info

The System Status window allows you to look at a summary of system and hardware, your network's status, all running system services, and the resource monitor.


The resource monitor is crucial for monitoring the server's hardware resources.

Multimedia Management

The Media Library service scans designated folders for multimedia files, like photos, videos, or music and indexes them into the media library. You should be careful with these options since frequent scans can significantly affect NAS performance, especially when combined with big network transfers. This service should ideally stop automatically once the network or CPU load is above a specified threshold.