It is interesting to see another NAS featuring an AMD SoC; however, I cannot say I was impressed by the performance and power consumption this time around. I expected higher transfer speeds and much lower power consumption, especially under load. Moreover, the performance levels with external storage devices were disappointing, which is a great shame. As it seems, Intel's SoCs have an edge over AMD SoCs when it comes to NAS servers. The strong point of this NAS is in its two PCIe slots and the upgrades these allow for. For instance, you can install an NVIDIA GT 1030 to increase encoding speeds, or a QM2 PCIe card that allows for an additional two M.2 SSDs for four in total since the mainboard already has two slots for M.2 drives. There is a version of the QM2 PCIe card that includes 10Bg@ connectivity if the four Gigabit Ethernet ports are not enough. Lastly, you can also install a PCIe wireless network card to have the TS-473 take on the role of a wireless base station with the compatible application (WirelessApp Station).

While its performance is not ground breaking, the TS-473 has many features thanks to its open architecture, and the QTS operating system is fantastic and an absolute pleasure to work with regardless of whether you are a novice user or highly experienced network administrator. Apparently, a notable amount of this product's hefty price tag covers the cost of development for QTS and the support QNAP provides for this product.

There are four available RAM slots on the mainboard. If open to replacing the pre-installed DIMMs with a capacity of 4 GB in total, you can expand this NAS server's RAM total to 64 GB, which is absolute overkill for a NAS running a custom-tailored Linux distribution light on system resources. However, it is nice to have the option to upgrade the amount of RAM considerably should you want to nonetheless.

I would like to see higher performance, especially with external storage, lower power consumption, higher quality trays with locks and sound dampening material, an eSATA port for being able to expand the storage of this NAS in the future, and a longer warranty. The positive aspects of this NAS are that it is among the very few with support for PCIe expansion cards, including specific graphics cards, the amount (4x) of provided Gigabit Ethernet ports, its silent operation, and high quality power supply, which is very important in a product that is meant to operate around the clock. With a lower price, this NAS would be a very good choice for a small home office or enthusiast users wanting a server with increased multimedia encoding capabilities (with the addition of a GPU, of course).