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Its a great little product depending on your needs. This 4-bay unit comes in at around the same price as most 2-bay units with a lot of extra features that bring it into the modern world. There's dual slots of DDR4 SODIMM (expandable to 16GB), dual slots for NVME SSDs (Gen 3x1), dual 2.5G LAN ports (backwards compatible), PCIe slot for expansion, dual USB3.2 Gen 2 ports, HDMI 2.1 out (4K). The unit is quite compact and fairly stylish and wouldn't look out of place next to a PC or TV. With all this good stuff you might have been thinking what's the down side? I'm glad you asked! 1. The unit (depending on whether you get the 4GB or 2GB) comes with either 4GB soldered (not expandable) or 2GB (removable and able to be upgraded to 16GB. The 2GB included would barely run anything so it would have been better to just supply as a bare bones NAS and chuck in whatever you like. I put 2x8GB Kingston's in here and runs well. 2. Dual NVMEs - Great except they only use one lane and limited to 1000Mb/s. So no use putting any high end SSDs like Samsung EVOs and the like that transfer at 5000Mb/s 3. SSD storage is still expensive past 2TB so not a really good choice as storage, but good for accelerated cache and App storage. As you don't need much storage for cache a 500GB SSD and if you want to store personal files then maybe a 2TB in the other slot. 4. 2.5G Ethernet again is still relatively expensive for the other networking requirements (Routers, switch, PC adapters etc). So unless you already have that in place you'll have to fork out for these to take advantage of the transfer speeds. 5. Dual USB2.0 ports - why is this still a thing in 2023/2024 USB2.0 putting USB2.0 connections on anything? At a minimum it should be USB3 of some description. It doesn't cost any extra and realistically once setup, you're probably not going to attach keyboards etc. You're more likely to attach external drives. 6. It only comes with an older (2021) dual core CPU N4505. Although it has burst speeds up to 2.9Ghz, it's base speed is 2GHz. Its a good processor for general media streaming and file serving but going to be a bit limited if you want to try and run virtual machines on this. Having the SSDs will help speed things up a bit. Now for the nitty gritty. So to setup, you'll need to install either some HDDs or an SSD so the OS has somewhere to write to. Remember the SSD slots? Well you can install the OS and apps to that (I installed a crucial 500GB SSD installing the apps to that and half for cache). To install HDDs, QNAPscome with no tool plastic caddies. Just take the side clips off, put the HDD in the caddy, attach the side clips again and slot them into the unit. The plastic caddies aren't bad and help stop HDD vibration. As with most QNAP products it comes with QNAPs QTS operating system. Its easy to use and get set up. One good thing I noticed was the Admin account now gets turned off after you create a local account to stop hackers from trying to access while initially setting it up. The HDMI port with a keyboard/mouse attached is relatively useless when it comes to setting the unit up as they don't work well at this stage. You'll still need to just boot it up headless and use Qfinder to locate the allocated IP and login that way to setup. Once it's all running, it comes with some pre-installed Apps to help you get started. Some I would also install is the firewall app and QuBoost. Don't bother with Qsync as it's a terrible backup App and you're likely to loose files between your PC and the NAS. There's also a package for most media streaming Apps (like Plex, Emby and Jellyfin). And that's about it - there's plenty of tutorials on YT on how to setup QTS and using QNAPs apps. My final thoughts: Its a good unit for general file serving and media streaming although the CPU is maybe a little under powered for anything other than this. The 2GB RAM is way too low to do anything useful with and you'll need to shlll out for extra memory straight away. Don't buy the 4GB solder in unit - waist of money and defeats the purpose. The dual NVMEs are a welcome inclusion although limited (1000Mb/s). USB2.0 on any hardware in 2023+ is just plain lazy. Nice compact unit and wouldn't be out of place sitting next to the TV or in a media unit. Read full review
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