A NAS would normally provide a ton of storage space, or come with the ability to support it. Well, this is clearly not the case with QNAP's new NASbook since it only supports M.2 SSDs. Its maximum capacity is currently 4 TB before its drives are formatted, and these 4 TB will also set you back by quite a bit since high capacity M.2 drives aren't cheap. However, the good news is that you can use a QNAP expansion unit with the NASbook to expand its storage with HDDs. While you can, doing so makes it just as stationary as a regular NAS, negating its mobility, which is one of the strong points of QNAP's NASbook. You would also have to spend more money on an expansion unit. As I see it, this NAS addresses a rather small portion of users who for some reason or another need a small NAS with an embedded network switch and lots of multimedia options.

The TBS-453A utilizes strong components for a NAS, and its list of features is pretty long. Its most notable feature is the amazing QTS operating system, which is among the best ones available today. Only Synology is able to meet QNAP eye-to-eye in terms of the software. The TBS-453A also comes with four camera licenses and supports up to 40, should you want to build an advanced recording station with it. There are even audio-out and two microphone ports for those of you with a nice voice (or those who think they have one) looking to practice their karaoke skills.

The limited storage space without the use of an expansion unit is not its only shortcomings. The most annoying one to me is the long boot time of the QTS OS. I have to wonder why QNAP doesn't do something about it since this is my go-to complaint with all of my QNAP NAS reviews thus far. I expected boot times to improve with M.2 SSDs, but even this NAS takes ages to boot when compared to other NAS servers. I would also like the HDMI ports to be compatible with the newest HDMI 2.0 version instead of the older 1.4b standard that doesn't support refresh rates above 30 Hz with 4K resolution, and there is the ridiculous price difference of 150 bucks between the 4G and 8G models! That is a huge amount for a 4 GB stick, don't you think! If you need 8 GB of RAM, you should definitely grab the smaller model and just replace its RAM modules. However, you should replace both since these only have a capacity of 2 GB each. That's right, instead of using a single 4 GB DIMM, which would make RAM upgrades easy, QNAP made it as expensive and difficult as could be by using two smaller DIMMs instead. While it has its shortcomings, I do believe the TBS-453A to be an innovative product, and once the capacities of M.2 SSDs increase far beyond the 1 TB threshold, it will actually have a place as a traditional NAS server as well. Needless to say, storage costs will be very high, but that is something users looking for such a compact NAS should be prepared to cope with.