QNAP TBS-h574TX All-Flash NASbook Review

How Much Does it Cost?

There’s no easy way to put it, but it’s certainly not cheap. With the price of the QNAP 5 Bay TBS-H574TX-I5-16G Desktop NASBook Enclosure comes in at £1799.99 and that doesn’t include any drives. This certainly makes it one of the most expensive 5-bay NAS on the market, but at the same time, it’s also one of the fastest and most powerful. NAS often have lower-powered processors, but this one has the i5-1340PE, it also has 10GbE networking and supports both M.2 drives and the newer E1.S drives, and all of those things add to the overall cost.

Overview

This certainly isn’t the NAS for everyone, and if you’re just at home wanting some backups, and somewhere to dump your Plex server for a few movies, it’s complete overkill. However, suppose like us you need to move massive files between multiple devices for content creation, be that game development, video editing or music production. In that case, it can be a very powerful tool indeed.

The biggest benefit here, as far as I can see, is the 10GbE networking. When you combine that with the blazing-fast speeds that are possible on either M.2 or E1.S drives, you can far exceed the performance of more traditional 3.5″ drive NAS configurations. With traditional HDD you need to use RAID5 with 10 drives just to get to around 900-1000mbps transfer speeds, however, with M.2 you can use relatively cheaper NVMe drives without RAID, and still get even higher speeds.

While we only used 1TB drives you can go much more beyond that on M.2 and E1.S with 4TB and sometimes 8TB drives being viable options if you’ve got deep enough pockets for them. Furthermore, the new E1.S drives are built bigger than M.2 drives and allow for more robust feature sets, that can further enhance your NAS experience. With support for a range of RAID configurations, have plenty of flexibility on how you choose to deploy the five available bays.

The powerful processor, extremely fast networking, and fast SSD support, make light work of keeping up with heavy workloads and I doubt having a large set of users accessing this drive would pose any issue for it, and while the performance we saw in our own testing is impressive, it’s still barely scratching the surface oh how fast you could push this unit.

With support for Windows and Mac users, the QNAP runs the TBS-h574TX runs the ZFS-based QuTS hero operating system, however, if you prefer a more traditional QNAP experience, you can run the QTS operating system too.

Should I Buy One?

The NAS itself may not be cheap, but you do get what you pay for. With support for very fast hard drives, but retaining a compact design with impressive cooling capabilities, extremely fast networking capabilities, 20 Gbps Thunderbolt 4, 10 Gbps USB 3.2 Gen 2, and a powerful processor to deal with things like real-time 4K video transcoding, and in a form factor that is both compact and stylish, makes this one of the most exceptional NAS we’ve ever had the pleasure of testing. Sure, it’s total overkill for a lot of people, but when it comes to content creation, it’s a very powerful tool that can significantly speed up your workflow.