General Settings

The General Settings group provides system-administration-specific options. You can change the server's name or system port here, alter time settings, check codepage options, and specify password rules. These options also allow you to set the login screen's style.

Storage Manager

Storage Manager tracks model, size, and the current status of all installed HDDs. You can also format and check on HDDs or pick the RAID level that suits your needs here. The TS-451+ supports the following RAID levels with four HDDs installed: RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 5, RAID 6, and RAID 10. You can also configure the HDDs in JBOD (Just a Bunch of Disks) to combine all HDDs into one big volume. The best options are RAID 5 (at least three HDDs are required) as it can tolerate the failure of one HDD and RAID 6 (at least four HDDs are required) because it can tolerate the failure of up to two HDDs. You can also use Storage Manager to create iSCSI storage arrays and add iSCSI targets of other QNAP NAS or storage servers to the NAS as virtual disks for storage-expansion purposes.


The steps it takes to create a new volume are detailed in these screenshots. It is a very easy procedure to follow.


A new feature was added to QTS 4.2, called Snapshot. Snapshots can be used with iSCSI LUNs and volumes and offers full protection. Up to 256 snapshots are supported for each volume or LUN, and up to 1024 snapshots are supported for the whole system. There are also two types of snapshots, local and remote. An important advantage of this snapshot technology compared to traditional file backups is that you can recover a file in a folder or the entire folder instantly with only a few clicks, instead of having to recover the whole data set just for one or several files you might need. QNAP's snapshot function also provides the necessary tools to help you find the files you want to recover. You are able to view files and folders in a snapshot and browse through them in chronological order. The files a snapshot contains can also be edited directly by users, and the remote snapshot replica allows you are to replicate volumes and LUNs between different remote servers, either on a schedule or immediately.

QNAP states that at least 4 GB of system RAM are required for the snapshot function to work, so you will have to buy the 8 GB version of the TS-451+ if you need this feature.

Network Settings

The Network group gives you access to all TCP/IP settings, which is where you would, for instance, enable Port Trunking mode. You should enable the option for more 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.