QNAP TS-251A 2-Bay SOHO NAS Review

GUI – Monitoring: System Status, Ressources Logs, and Virtual Switch

System Status

Keeping an eye on your NAS’ health and status is also an easy thing with QTS and it’s all once again collected in one place – the fittingly named System Status function.

The first page has all the basic information on your NAS such as its name, model name, and hardware information from CPU to RAM and firmware.

The same goes for the network status where you’ll find all information on all available connections – both real and virtual.

The system service pane is very useful to get a quick view on which services are running and which aren’t as well as some details on them such as port usage.

The hardware information pane has more details on, yes you guessed it, the hardware. Here we have details on the CPU and its usage, the memory type, setup, and brand, as well as the systems temperature and current fan speed.

System Monitoring

System monitoring is an easy way to see whether your NAS is bottlenecked for your operation and works much in the same way as the Task Manager in Windows. The first page shows us the utilization of each available CPU core.

The next shows us the memory usage.

The third the disk and volume usage.

And the fourth is for the network utilization.

We also get a process list that shows which app uses how much of our CPU and memory. A great way to find things that might hog up your resources.

The last page here is for the disk usage, but not for the capacity. Instead, it shows the latency and IOPS performance.

System Logs

The system logs is hopefully a place that you’ll never need to visit, because it is usually because something has gone wrong that you’ll want to go here. But if that should be the case, then you’ll easily find out what here – from network connections over drive connections to users. All in one place.

System connection logs aren’t turned on by default, but that’s done as easy as pressing the start button at the top.

You can also quickly watch which users currently are logged into your NAS.

And you can enable the Syslog which when enabled can save event logs and connection logs to a remote Syslog server.

Network and Virtual Switch

The virtual switch feature is relatively new, but it’s an awesome feature that allows you to utilize the available network ports a lot better, especially when you’re running VMs on the system too. No longer do you need a dedicated adapter per VM. QNAP also put all the other network features in the same app to make it all easier and have it all in one place.

We have all the available connections in one place, for the TS-251A that’s two Gigabit Ethernet ports.

We can link and trunk the ports should be want to.

And this is also where we configure the unique QuickAccess port – although that’s already done by default. But we can change those settings too.

You can also hook up a USB Wi-Fi dongle to the NAS and connect it to wireless networks – and it works the same way as any other system with Wi-Fi.

The Virtual switch can be a bit tricky to configure, but QTS will guide you through the process and explain what each of the different functions and features does when you choose to add a new virtual switch.

You can also configure the DHCP server and default gateway from this little app.