Storage Manager

The QTS 4.1 OS' Storage Manager is one of the OS' most interesting features, so we had to look at it separately.


Storage Manager tracks model, size, and the current status of all installed HDDs. You can also format and check HDDs and choose 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), where all HDDs are seen as one big drive. The best options are RAID 5 (at least three HDDs are required), which can tolerate the failure of one HDD, and RAID 6 (at least four HDDs are required), which can tolerate the failure of up to two HDDs.


All available disk options can be found in this menu.


The Global Settings group allows you to enable Predictive SMART Migration and set the disk SMART polling time.


Use this panel to create, expand, remove, check, rename, or format a volume. You can also create new shared folders inside of an already created volume. You should enable system cache if you want faster speeds.


If you install an SSD, you can enable Cache Acceleration, which boosts the NAS' access performance.


Creating an iSCSI storage array is a pretty straightforward task.


Use his function to add the iSCSI targets of other QNAP NAS or storage servers to the NAS as virtual disks for storage-expansion purposes. The NAS supports up to eight virtual disks.

Strangely enough, we didn't find the Storage Pool menu, which allowed for the aggregation of physical hard-disk drives into a single, large storage drive for enhanced RAID protection, in this version of Storage Manager. QNAP most likely decided to abandon the idea. We also didn't find an option to create encrypted volumes.