Administration Interface

The desktop's design is nice and intuitive. QNAP put lots of effort into bringing their QTS OS up to the high levels it currently is at, and its overall design is immaculate since it is user friendly and brimming with options.


The top bar gives you access to many important functions and settings.


QTS gives you the ability to tailor everything to your needs. You can, for starters, move and rearrange icons on the desktop and immediately access basic administrative functions, logs, and external devices. This interface even allows inexperienced users to easily control such fully featured NAS servers as the TBS-453A. It also supports many languages, and you can easily switch to a language of your choice.


The administrative options will allow you to change your password, specify your email address, change your profile picture, or set a wallpaper by picking an existing one or uploading yours. There are also several other miscellaneous options here for you to configure.


The dashboard is well designed, providing you with important information, including HDD- and system statistics. The resource monitor is also quite important because it shows CPU-, RAM-, and bandwidth usage, and its hardware section tracks HDD and system temperatures and, when applicable, fan speed(s). The online-user portion displays all currently connected users. If you want to disconnect or block a user or IP, you only have to click on the user and pick the action. Please note that all these dashboard widgets can be dragged onto the desktop. The dashboard's color will also reflect your system's health to give you a quick way of figuring out whether everything is running as it should.


Use the Control Panel icon to access System Settings, Privilege Settings, Network Services, and Applications.

Control Panel - Hardware and Power Settings

These options allow you to configure the NAS's hardware functions. The most important ones are HDD Standby, Write Cache, which nets you increased write performance, and the Smart Fan, which allows you to set the fan to auto-mode or a customized fan profile.


ErP, or EuP, stands for Energy Using Product and is a directive developed by the European Union. It is a measure of how much power a system consumes, and its purpose is to protect the environment by regulating how much energy goes to waste. The ErP Lot 6 2013 directive asks for less than 0.5 W power consumption in standby and is obligatory for every PC system or NAS sold in the EU. The TBS-453A will consume less than 0.5 W in standby with EuP enabled, but enabling it will disable Wake on LAN, AC power resumption, and all scheduled power settings.