QNAP TS-453B Quad-Core Multimedia NAS Reviewed

[thiggins]

QNAP's TS-453B is an expensive four-bay NAS, even before adding optional 10GbE.

Read on SmallNetBuilder

 

[BrianBloom]

I appreciate the speed testing, but these days, NASes are so much more sophisticated than just external storage that posting a bunch of Read and Write benchmarks doesn't paint much of a picture of its capabilities. No elaboration of *what* multimedia capabilities it offered other than observing it had HDMI ports. Plex? Kodi? Streaming services? How can that SD slot be used? What's the remote do? Virtualization wasn't even *mentioned* in the article.

I just bought a TS-653B and have been learning its Docker and virtualization capabilities and was curious how this model compared to, say, Synology's 1517+ in that respect. The average user buying one of this class of NAS is probably not looking for the absolute fastest storage. They are looking for a robust application server, a swiss army knife of networking, media, and home/small business functionality solutions. It would be nice to have some qualitative assessments and feedback too rather just the limited file transfer quantitative ones.

Or said differently, the article is entitled "Multimedia NAS Reviewed" but then doesn't actually review anything about the multimedia. In fact it's aptly titled "TS-453B NAS Benchmarked" than a "review" anyway.

 

[thiggins]

All good points. Any fault lies with me, not Craig. He produced the review I asked him to write, which was to focus on performance.

These NASes have so many features, it's not feasible to review them all. Even if we took a shot at it, you have your list of things you'd like to see, others may have a different list.

Sorry to disappoint you. But you'll have to look elsewhere for the type of NAS review you seek. We can no longer afford to produce them.

 

[sfx2000]

These NASes have so many features, it's not feasible to review them all. Even if we took a shot at it, you have your list of things you'd like to see, others may have a different list.

Sorry to disappoint you. But you'll have to look elsewhere for the type of NAS review you seek. We can no longer afford to produce them.

There's a bit of an arms race with the NAS vendors - and they're throwing in a lot of functionality these days...

@thiggins has a good point - which functions, and even then, current HW jumps pretty fast with SW improvements.

The basics - this is fairly common - SMB/AFP/NFS performance - and that's reasonable.

When getting into the verticals - it's a bit of a mess, as by the time the review is published, things might change.

 

[sanke1]

I have the 653B model with Intel X540-T2 10 GBE card in it. My PC also has the same card. Both PC and 653B connect to 8 Port Netgear 10-Gigabit XS708E-200NES switch. Cable is CAT6 with less than 15 mts length.

I used 6 x 4TB Seagate Ironwolf NAS hard drives in RAID10 for fastest performance.
However, even I am unable to get more than 400 MBPS (3.2 Gbps) read and write speeds. My PC has 512 GB Samsung 960 PRO m.2 drive on which I carried the tests to eliminate speed bottlenecks.

Is the speed I am getting correct or I need to do some twerking?

I expected transfer speeds between 500 and 600 MBPS.

The NAS itself is good, however the back cover which you remove to install PCI card is made of terrible terrible plastic. It has thin screw holder arches which break off at the neck. In first attempt of opening, 3/4 arches broke off. So I wont be able to screw and tighten the black cover ever. QNAP has recognised the issue as bad production batch and has asked me to RMA the whole enclosure back to Taiwan. That’s ridiculous and I will continue to use the back cover in broken state. I would have appreciated they sending me just the back cover from new production batch to my address.

 

[sfx2000]

I used 6 x 4TB Seagate Ironwolf NAS hard drives in RAID10 for fastest performance.
However, even I am unable to get more than 400 MBPS (3.2 Gbps) read and write speeds. My PC has 512 GB Samsung 960 PRO m.2 drive on which I carried the tests to eliminate speed bottlenecks.

Is the speed I am getting correct or I need to do some twerking?

I expected transfer speeds between 500 and 600 MBPS.

Local drive performance on a similar processor - N3700 with a Samsung 850evo SSD... NUC's are fun as reference platforms...

$ hdparm -tT /dev/sda
/dev/sda:
Timing cached reads:   2746 MB in  2.00 seconds = 1372.57 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 1534 MB in  3.00 seconds = 510.84 MB/sec

J1900 - TS-453Pro - QTS 4.3... 4 drives, RAID10, Seagate Enterprise

$ hdparm -Tt /dev/mapper/cachedev1
/dev/mapper/cachedev1:
Timing cached reads:   7264 MB in  2.00 seconds = 3632.48 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads:  1136 MB in  3.00 seconds = 378.51 MB/sec

So... the buffered reads are probably more relevant... so 400MB/Sec is not bad... A single SSD is going to more more efficient and faster than a RAID10 on a spinning cluster of 6 drives...

It might be the CPU that is the limiting factor with 10Gbe for any NAS... one wants great performance on 10Gbe - go to a big core from Intel or AMD

For a gigabit LAN, the numbers are more than good enough...

The NAS itself is good, however the back cover which you remove to install PCI card is made of terrible terrible plastic. It has thin screw holder arches which break off at the neck. In first attempt of opening, 3/4 arches broke off. So I wont be able to screw and tighten the black cover ever. QNAP has recognised the issue as bad production batch and has asked me to RMA the whole enclosure back to Taiwan. That’s ridiculous and I will continue to use the back cover in broken state. I would have appreciated they sending me just the back cover from new production batch to my address.

Sad to hear - the earlier NAS products from QNAP - they were robust enough...

 

[Threska49]

All good points. Any fault lies with me, not Craig. He produced the review I asked him to write, which was to focus on performance.

These NASes have so many features, it's not feasible to review them all. Even if we took a shot at it, you have your list of things you'd like to see, others may have a different list.

Sorry to disappoint you. But you'll have to look elsewhere for the type of NAS review you seek. We can no longer afford to produce them.

I can certainly see why hardware is the focus. If the foundation of a NAS isn't any good, it doesn't matter what is layered on top. All of it would suffer. As for the rest NAS as a product is still mostly for the skilled. It will take a bit more work before it will have the needed ease of use demanded by the average consumer.

 

[Dukat]

I'm looking to upgrade my 6 year old Synology which has worked great.
It's used primarily for storage and streaming videos to either PC's or Western Digital Live / Apple TV boxes.

I can't decide between Synology DS916+ and QNAP TS-453B.

The QNAP appears to have a lot more hardware features and virtualization sounds like a nice to have. I've been asking around for opinions but so far people either say QNAP is great or QNAP sucks, Synology is great.

In the past people seem to agree that Synology OS was far more stable but it seems that QNAP may have caught up at this point.

Can anyone offer an objective opinion on which they'd recommend and why?

Thank you

 

[thiggins]

Both Synology and QNAP have wide product lines and OSes supporting many features.

Choice usually comes down to personal preference and many times some advanced feature supported by one but not the other.

 

[Dukat]

In your experience are the newer QNAP units as reliable as Synology?
Their warranty is shorter which makes me worry.
I'm leaning towards the TS-453B because the hardware seems to outclass the DS916+ in almost every respect, but the shorter warranty and a flawless 5 years without a single crash on my old Syno makes me hesitant. The 453B also has very few reviews at this time. Amazon only showed 1 review when I filtered the reviews for this specific model.

 

[thiggins]

I have a dual-bay QNAP and single bay Synology and WD NASes. They are used solely for backup. None have ever given me any problems. The Synology and WD are at least 5 years old. The QNAP is about 3.

 

[sanke1]

I have scrapped Raid10 and gone with Raid6 with 6 (4TB drives) Seagate IronWolf. My sequential read speeds have jumped from 300 MBPS (2.4 Gbps) to 700 MBPS (5.6 Gbps). Write speeds are now around 400 MBPS. I used $ 88 fake Intel X540-T2 from ebay on my QNAP TS-653B and ASUS XG-C100C 10gbit PCIe card on my PC. My switch is the same Netgear XS708E-200NES. I am quite satisfied with the setup now and it challenges some higher and costly setups at offices.
The only problem is the faulty outside plastic casing which is now cracked at screw mounts.