SNMP

The SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) service reports real-time events, errors, and warnings that occur to a PC with the proper SNMP software installed, which is incredibly useful if you are want to monitor the NAS through the network, or the Internet.

EuP

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 TVS-463 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.

Storage Manager

Storage Manager tracks model, size, and the current status of all installed HDDs. You can also format and check HDDs or pick the RAID level that suits your needs here. The TVS-463 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. 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.


All available disk options can be found in this menu.


Use these panels to create, expand, and remove a storage pool or to check, rename, or format a volume while performing any of those actions. You can also create new shared folders inside of an already existing volume. You should enable System Cache if you want faster speeds.


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


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


The steps it takes to create a new volume are shown in the screenshots above. As you can see, it is a very easy process to follow.

External Devices

All connected external storage disks, USB printers, and UPS devices can be configured through these options. You can format external storage disks into all popular formats, including EXT4, NTFS, and FAT32.

Applications

The control panel contains the Applications menu through which you can install and configure all available QNAP stations and applications. One of the most interesting ones is HybridDesk Station, which, briefly, is a platform onto which the famous Kodi (formerly known as XBMC) application and Chrome, along with other tools, can be installed to create the ability to browse the web or playback NAS multimedia content on a TV via the HDMI interface. This application will surely be of interest to home users since it makes multimedia players and HTPCs redundant. That said, HybridDesk Station can still be very useful in business environments since it makes locally accessing the administration interface without a client possible.

App Center

App Center is a managerial platform for installing add-ons to the NAS. Users can search for, install, remove, and update already installed apps. It is, in other words, like the App Store of Apple's iOS operating system. Applications are separated into categories. There are also lists of QNAP's selected applications and the recommendations QNAP makes. As you can see, the list of available applications is large, and you will find more after only a quick online search. However, you should only install applications that are already verified by QNAP to avoid complications. While the installation itself is automated, you can also manually install these application.