QNAP TS-453 Mini NAS Review

Introduction Most NAS systems are built around the same basic design, but not all of them. Once in a while a device comes along that is something just a little bit special and today I'm taking a closer look at just one of them. I got the new and innovative QNAP TS-453 mini on the testbench, an NAS that features the easy-to-use QTS operating system, powerful hardware, and a unique top-loading mechanism for the drives. It also comes with one of the easiest and most convenient ways to replace or upgrade the memory. Thanks to the innovative design, the TS-453 mini has a very small footprint for a 4-bay NAS unit. It takes up 29% less space than a normal QNAP 4-bay unit such as the TS-453 Pro that we recently took a look at. The glossy black design looks great, but it isn't so great for photos. You can clearly see my camera in most shots and in some you'll even be able to see the reflection of my monitor that is a good 5 meters away. This is mainly based on the photo lighting and won't be as extreme in your own setup. You'll have to take my word for it, it is gorgeous. The TS-453 mini also comes with QNAP's relative new myQNAPcloud key that allows for incredible easy setup as I'll be showing you later. You can even use the TS-453 mini as full-fledged PC thanks to the virtualization support in QvPC. It allows you to install basically any operating system from Windows to Android in a virtual environment and run it directly from the NAS. That is simply an epic feature. The NAS has dual Gigabit LAN, USB 2.0, USB 3.0, and an HDMI out. This setup and QNAP's QvPC technology allows you can use it directly with a VM setup or as HTPC. Connect the NAS to your TV or monitor, attach a mouse and keyboard, and you got a media station without the need for another PC. You can adjust the LED indicators' brightness in 5 steps from the dashboard so you don't need to worry about them shining up your entire living room. The skyline LED indication will also remind you when the system is in sleep mode and you can schedule the times where it needs to be on and off. The top of the NAS lifts off for easy drive access and it secures just as easy again. The powerful magnets in the top will pull the lid right into place and make sure it stays there. The best feature is hidden on the bottom of the NAS, a single screw to remove a lid is all it takes to upgrade the memory in this system. It couldn't be easier to upgrade the RAM in your NAS than this, although it isn't really needed in this case as it is the model with 8GB RAM. Models with less RAM are also available. As this is the TS-453 mini model with 8GB of RAM, we see that two modules are pre-mounted. You could still replace them, but there really isn't any need here. The basic model comes with 2GB RAM. The drive trays are very convenient to use and don't require any tools or screws for 3.5-inch drives. You'll need screws if you want to mount 2.5-inch drives in the caddies. Just pull the sides off the caddy, insert the drive and put the sides back on - all done. In fact, you can set up the entire NAS with a single tool and the only place you'll need a screwdriver at all is if you wish to upgrade the RAM. I've talked a lot about this NAS and I have barely touched the hardware yet. At the heart of the TS-453 mini you'll find a quad-core Intel Celeron 2.0GHz processor with boost up to 2.41GHz. This CPU will bring a lot more power to the table than seen from most ARM based NAS devices and it should be something that really shows a difference when dealing with the AES 256-bit volume encryption and comparing the benchmarks to non-encrypted drives. As previously mentioned, you can get this NAS with either 2GB or 8Gb DDR3 memory. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Epze6O4p1TU Within the package you find everything you need to get started. The NAS itself is protected with an adhesive film all the way around and you get two LAN cables, a PSU brick, easy setup guide, and an infrared remote control. The QTS system is a great operating system that provides all the basics features natively. Anything that isn't found among the basic features can be installed via add-on packages directly from within the management system. The TS-453 mini is a little marvelous wonder with everything it can do. I've already mentioned some of the features, but there is so much more. Next to the QvPC technology for virtualization and HTPC usage it also features RTRR for easy data management and backup, NAS and iSCSI-SAN unified storage solution for server virtualization. It also supports VMware, Citrix, and Hyper-V and you can easy expand the raw storage capacity up to 96TB with the optional UX-800P QNAP expansion enclosure. Security is an important feature and next to the AES 256-bit hardware encryption engine it also offers anti-virus and a multitude of backup solutions as well as cloud integration - both personal and public clouds. On the front you'll find a USB 3.0 port with quick copy button that can be configured to work the way you'll like it best and the system supports everything from third-party backup software such as Acronis True Image and Symantec Backup Exec as well as Real-Time Remote Replication, Rsync, and Amazon S3, Amazon Glacier, Microsoft Azure, ElephantDrive, Dropbox and Google Cloud Storage. On-the-fly and offline transcoding help to create the best possible media experiences no matter what device you connect from and the SSD cache acceleration can be used to speed up the IOPS in environments where that is needed, which mostly will be enterprise scenarios. Qsirch is a new google-like search feature that recently was added to QNAPs products. It requires some resources, but nothing this system can't handle. In return, you get the probably fastest and best search solution found in any NAS system. A few keywords from meta-data, file content, or name and Qsirch will find your files. Mobile devices are covered just as well as PC systems. There are a lot of apps available providing a direct connection to you NAS as well as synchronization options for your mobile devices. The comprehensive Surveillance Station is of course also present and allows you to connect over 2700 different certified IP cameras to the NAS and monitor it in real time, record, and anything else you'll want in a security station. Two camera channel are included and it can be expanded up to 24 channels. A closer look inside I think it is about time we take a look inside this NAS and then get it going for a setup and some benchmarking. The first and easiest thing to remove is the memory and the QNAP TS-453 mini came with two 4GB DDR3 SO-DIMM modules from Transcend. The TS-453 mini isn't just different on the outside, it is also very different on the inside. A general design change was needed in order to achieve this small form factor. Once we remove the top from the NAS and have a look insides, the most noticeable thing we see is the fan and airflow design. While the air flow direction is the same as we're used to, the unique design makes the NAS produce even less noise and makes it a perfect NAS to be on your desk or living room. A rare thing to find is a NAS that only uses one PCB, especially in the 4-bay department. But that is what QNAP came up with for this TS-453 mini and it looks great. Most items are fitted on what is mounted towards the bottom. We see the RAM slots again that peeked through the opening earlier and above them is the Intel Celeron dual-core CPU and a pretty big heatsink. At the bottom left you see the flash module for the operating system. There are a few other chips to identify on this side and among them are two Intel Gigabit LAN controllers and an ASmedia ASM1442 for HDMI Rev1.3a based output. The top side of the motherboard features the four SATA ports data and power ports directly mounted. There is an ASmedia ASM1074 USB 3.0 HUB controller as well as a Marvell 88SE9215 chip that connects the SATA ports to the PCI Express lanes. The Fintek F71869AD chip is mainly used for Super Hardware Monitoring but also provides controller support for keyboard, UART ports, parallel ports and more. The flash module is a standard removable one as we've seen in so many systems and it comes from the house of Apacer. System Specifications, Features & Power Consumption Hardware Specifications Login The login screen is customizable, but I quite like the default screen. It is fresh and you quickly find the login button and public apps if installed. Dashboard QNAP's QTS operating system has come a long way since its start and we get the familiar and customizable dashboard that gives us everything we need right there. Software Specifications Features Power Consumption The chart contains the actual power consumption measured at the PSU connection and while loaded with a maximum amount of drives. Peak, or maximum, power draw will occur during boot times. Setup - Initialization & Storage There are a multitude of ways you can get started and initialize this new QNAP TS-453 mini NAS. You can use the myQNAPcloud with your PC or mobile device and you can even install it directly when connecting a keyboard, mouse, and HDMI monitor. Those methods are both easy and fast, but not as easy to screenshot for a review. My preferred method is the QNAP Qfinder software, a little tool that quickly finds all QNAP devices on your network and that provides help on configuring and using your NAS devices. The Qfinder quickly finds your new NAS and as it can see that it isn't initialized yet, it will prompt you whether to do so now or not. The first thing it does is to check for available updates and there was one this time. It is always recommended to update to the newest firmware for two reasons, bug fixes and new features. We can continue with our setup once the NAS update has finished and the system rebooted. You got two choices now, whether to create a basic setup for home use or business use. The difference is mainly in what apps and features get pre-installed. Whether you picked Quick Setup or Manual setup on the previous page, it doesn't take much to get the QNAP NAS going. Two simple steps is all it takes. The first is to define the server name, admin name, password, and disk configuration. The second step is to set up the basic networking. And that is all it takes. You get another look at your settings and chance to go back and change something. The setup is running and won't take long. How long mainly depends on your hard drive setup, capacity and mode. Pressing the Finish button will load the dashboard for the first time and a Quick Start guide will help you learn the basics of your new QTS operating system. Setup - Users, Services & Backup We've done our basic initialization and the system is running, what we need now are some users, user groups, and network shares. Users Our admin user was created during initialization, but we shouldn't be using that for normal access. Instead we'll create a row of users for our friends, coworkers, family, and who else might be allowed to access files and functions on our NAS. You only need a username and password to create a user, but you can set a lot more options. You can assign them to a group, set shared folder permissions and application priviledges. You can also let QTS email the person with information regarding their new account, that of course requires that you also enter an email address for the user. You can also create a lot of users at once. Same thing goes as for single creation except that it is split into more pages for easier setup. With our users created, we can now move on to the next step. User Groups User groups allow you to easily manage a lot of users at once, their rights and privileges. You get the same options as for single users, except this way you can change them for a whole group at once. Shared Folders There will be some default shared folders, which ones depend on what plugins, add-ons and features you select and install. Those will rarely be enough and you'll want to create your own. This could be personal folders, secure folders, or public folders. They could be for movies, files, tv shows, music, images, tax return - anything you want. Just like on your own PC. Go nuts, but keep it simple and try to keep in mind how you'll want to map, mount, and attach those shares on your systems. Setup - There is more, Add-Ons & External Devices There are so many functions in QNAP's QTS operating system, it is hard to cover them all. I still wanted to show a few more of all that is available. You can for example change how the login screen looks and what information should be displayed on there. In case you installed the system as a business in the first steps and still want to access all the media functions, then you'll find the function to turn it on within the System Administration pane under General Settings. Domain security such as Active Directory and LDAP authentication are both supported, so you won't have any trouble integrating it into your corporate network. Just as sharing your files won't be any problem, may you want network sharing to NFS, Mac, and Windows systems or use classing connections such as FTP and SSH. I did miss one feature in the FTP feature and that was the ability to turn FXP on and off. Accidentally deleting the wrong file on a network share can be painful, that is if you don't have the network recycle bin enabled. It works just as the desktop recycle bin that you're used to except that this one works on your network shares instead. Applications There are a lot of pre-installed applications and even more that you can add extra if your needs aren't satisfied by what you see. The main applications that will come in useful for most people are the Stations for Photos, Music, Files, downloading, and Surveillance. You can watch the system status from network throughput to the temperature of the CPU, system, and drives. If the temperatures seen below should be too high for your preference, then just dial-up the fan a little more. I do have to say, that it's awesome with these settings. You can't hear a thing from the NAS. Qsync allows for easy synchronization between all your devices. It will help you get started, tell you what apps you need and where you can find them. Just follow the onscreen instructions and you'll be done in no time. If you prefer other types of backup over synchronization, then QNAP has that part covered too. You'll find anything from Rsync over RTRR and Time Machine to normal NAS to NAS backups and easy setup for Cloud services such as Amazon S3 and ElephantDrive. Transcoding is one of the really great features on this NAS. It can do it on-the-fly or in the backgournd. You can set times when the automatics should kick in and what folders it should monitor for it. Your media will run great on any of your devices thanks to this. Built-in antivirus is another great feature. It will take some resources as you know from your normal setup, but those are resources well spent. The days where only Microsoft systems were the big targets is long gone. Any system is at risk these days and needs to be protected. the myQNAPcloud setup makes it easy to create your own personal cloud. It can help you configure your router for you thanks to UPnP, allows for easy VPN integration and can even link with the commercial providers. App Center - Get even more out of your QNAP NAS I've mentioned all the apps that you can install extra a couple of times and below you'll see a small part of them. That should give you somewhat an idea of all the QNAP QTS has to offer. External Devices You'll be prompted with a pop-up windows like it's seen below if you're logged into the QTS when you plug-in an external drive, unless of course you've previously told it to not show it again. You also find the drive under the External Storage settings where you can format or eject it as well as see its information. QvPC - A NAS with PC features and VM The QvPC technology is probably best solution for NAS servers since their original creation. Modern NAS devices have more than enough power to do so much more than just serving files and with the addition of a HDMI port you can use this QNAP TS-453 mini in more ways. You ran use it directly for HTPC functions and even install full operating systems in virtual environments. To get started with this, you'll need to install the HybridDesk Station. This is the base for your HDMI out and is required. There are a few default functions that you can't unselect, but most are optional. As with all QNAP apps, you can remove, add, and modify these choices at any time. The installation will take some time depending on how much you have selected. If you selected all, you easily can go make a cup of coffee as it will take a while. Once the setup is done, it will look like the screenshot below. All the selected apps are installed and ready. You can disable and remove individual apps at wish. Once you have the HybridDesk Station installed, you open the door to all sorts of fun directly on your NAS. But first you'll need to login. If you haven't already, connect a keyboard, mouse, and monitor to your NAS. Browse the web with Firefox or as seen below with Chrome. Configure your NAS directly from the NAS with the same interface that you're used to from your browser. You can do it all. There is no shortage on apps for your multimedia pleasures either. XMBC and KODI are probably the two most obvious choices, but there are more. You don't even have to have the files stored on the NAS itself to access them. I had no trouble streaming directly from my other network devices. Full access to my video library thanks to DLNA support, in this case through KODI. You can even game directly on the NAS. Two games are included right away and they arew OpenTTD and Battle for Wesnoth. Kick back and become the next virtual leader. Virtualization Station The second thing that QvPC brings along next to the HTPC usage is the virtualization station that allows you to install and run pretty much any operating system in a virtual environment. But we need to install and set the whole thing up before we can get started with the actual operating system. When the Virtualization Station is launched, it will check for the minimum requirements that are QTS 4.1.0 or higher, Intel VT-x technology, and at least 2GB RAM. The setup in itself is only two-step and a confirmation. Select the shared folder the VM has to run from and what network interface it shall use. The network usage is the only downside to this function as it requires a dedicated LAN port. This prevents us from running our normal NAS operation with link aggregation. A lot of people won't be able to fully utilize that speed anyway, so it isn't a big deal. The Virtualization Dashboard is as easy to use as any previous feature. You get a quick view of what's going on and there is no doubt which menu point to click next. We'll want to see how this works, so I'll create a VM for Windows and install my Windows 7 Ultimate operating system. I got an ISO file of this already, so it's the obvious choice. It is also one of the most likely choices among users. Got an old spare license? Why not use it! I picked the preconfigured large setup as it suits what I want very well. 4GB memory, 4 CPU cores and 160GB HDD should be enough to run Windows 7. Now that the VM is created, I just need to start it. It will power on and automatically start the installation. But first you should connect your USB keyboard and mouse to the VM. You need a way to control it if you use it directly. Installing Windows 7 Using the web interface to connect is a very convenient method, but not the smoothest ride. Anyone that ever worked with remote connections will know how it feels. It's still a good experience and easy enough if you don't need pixel accuracy in controls. The installation runs just like you're used to on any normal installation and once it is done, it will launch your fresh Windows VM installation for the first time configuration. If it wasn't for me selecting a wrong icon for the system manufacturer, one couldn't see the difference to a normal installation. If you can install Windows on a normal computer, you can also install it in a QvPC environment. Install and launch apps, run updates, browse the web, play media files - the choice is yours. The web interface features a nice timeout functions, but you can quickly login again. It's a nice and extra security for people that easily forget that they have that extra tab open. Virtualization Station continued Once the VM is running, we also see it in our VS dashboard. We can quickly get a view on what VMs we have running and how much performance they each use. You can also important and export VMs with a few steps. And you can download pre-made VM setups from the Bitnami App Store and VMware Virtual Appliances Marketplaces. There are a lot to choose from Testing Method Test system: Supermicro C7Z97-OCE Intel Xeon E3-1230Lv3 Exceleram EP3001A 2GB PC3-10666 Kingston HyperX 240GB SSD Sapphire R7 240 2GB Disks in Product: Western Digital RED 6TB 3.5-inch Angelbird SSD2go Pocket 512GB We would like to thank our sponsors for supplying us with the components needed for the test system as well as drives. Software used: The performance of the system we use to test with isn't a major factor when testing a device of this sort. The performance of the NAS box comes down to the network it is running on, the protocol used to connect, and its own internal hardware. With a device of this sort having so many different applications, Intel's NASPT software covers all the bases and also gives us a set of results that we will be able to utilise and therefore give a benchmark against other similar systems in the future. Intel NASPT (Network Attached Storage Performance Toolkit) performs its test by transferring varying sizes and quantities of data to and from the device based on twelve different scenarios. As part of the testing, the NAS is connected through a Netgear GS724TPS managed Gigabit switch and then to our test bench to give the best real world setup test that we can and the NAS itself will be packed with Western Digital's latest RED NAS drives. Intel's NASPT software does require us to drop the memory down to 2GB, as using any more would lead to data caching and therefore skew the results. I will be testing the NAS box performance under each of the RAID options that it has available as well just a single drive. The USB 3.0 speeds will be measured with our trusted Angelbird SSD2go Pocket drive. HD Video Playback HD Video playback is a read test, where a single 2 Gb file is read in 256 kB blocks sequentially from the drive. This simulates where a 720p HD video is being watched across the network to a media player on the other end. 2x HD Video Playback 2x HD Video Playback works with exactly the same data set as the first HD Video test, however this time the same content is streamed twice from the NAS box simulating two simultaneous streams being made to external media players. 4x HD Video Playback In the same way that the 2x Video Playback streams to the equivalent of 2 external media players at the same time, the test here doubles that again up to a simulated 4 media players. HD Video Record The HD Video Record test is as the name suggests a write test to the NAS box. A single 2 GB file is written to the device in 256 kB blocks sequentially to the disk. HD Playback & Record The HD playback and record test now put the drive under the same single record and playback tests as before, but now at the same time. This will factor for the quick changes needed to switch between reading and writing two large blocks of data across the network to the device. Content Creation For content creation, Intel have simulated access to via video creation applications. This is made up of 98 files with 12 MB reads and 14 MB writes in varying sizes of blocks. The activity is predominantly non-sequential with the majority of access time made up of writing to the drives. There are quiet periods of read/write activity interrupted with busy periods to present a difficult workload on the drives. Office Productivity The office productivity simulation is very similar to the content creation, with a total of 607 files written to and read from the drive. A total of 1.4 GB of data is written to and read from the drive with a close balance between each made - the majority of write access is made up of 1 kB writes. File Copy To NAS This test quite simply put copies a single large file from the test system to the NAS box to show how well the system can sustain a single write speed. The 1.4 GB file is copied to the drive and written in 64 kB blocks. File Copy From NAS File copy from the NAS works in exactly the same way as the copy test, however it works in the opposite direction. The single 1.4 GB file is read off the NAS in 64 kB blocks. Directory Copy To NAS In the directory copy to NAS test, a directory tree representing that of a typical commercially available office suite is copied to the NAS to trace the bulk copy of a complex directory. A total of 2833 files making up 247 MB are moved, but the file sizes vary considerably with an average size of 41.4 kB. Due to the varying sizes of the files, only around 50% of the writes are sequential. Directory Copy From NAS In the same way that the file copy from NAS traces the same file back across to the test system, the directory copy from NAS does exactly the same but to the entire directory that it copied across previously. Photo Album Last of all is a test based around a photo album. When a photo album is viewed on-screen, only the images that you see are loaded from the drive and so when you scroll through the album, the new images have to be fetched and read. The album here contains 169 photos with varying file sizes based on the size, quality and detail in the image. Reading the files in a photo album puts an unusual read load upon the drive as the metadata is read, a thumbnail constructed and finally the image viewed. Complete Benchmark: Average Throughput Intel NASPT provides a summary at the end of each benchmark, included in this is the average throughput from all the previous test as one number. This is a pretty good overall view of a device and as such I've started to included this as well. The numbers below are the average of the previous 12 tests. Encryption As mentioned previously in the review, security is an ever growing concern and encryption is a great step to achieve this. As such I will be including a comparison between an encrypted drive and a normal single drive for a basic comparison and to show if and how it will impact on your performance. Our benchmarks are real-world test and will variate a little. We see above that encryption doesn't have any real impact on our performance and some of the tests even showed better stats with encryption than without. This can be attributed to normal statistic anomalies and I think it's fair to say that encryption doesn't have any real performance impact on this NAS and that is mainly thanks to the choice of CPU. Final Thoughts Pricing US-based customers might still have someone of a hard time locating the QNAP TS-453 mini NAS, but it is available for a cost. Amazon has this 8GB model that I've just reviewed listed for $2031 while the 2GB model costs $1586. Moving on to Europe and it looks a bit better. UK customers can find it at Amazon for £489.99 and £379.99 for the 8G and 2G models respectively. German readers can find starting at €632 and €495. Overview The QNAP TS-453 mini is a truly unique NAS with its shape and internal build-up. That doesn't make it any worse than other NAS, in fact, it makes it better. The smaller footprint, easy to access drives and memory as well as a silent operation make this a perfect NAS for both home and offices. On top of the beautiful black design, it's also silent and you'll barely notice it even if it's located right next to you. The TS-453 mini otherwise comes with all the features that we're used to from QNAP, that aren't few. The NAS features comprehensive cloud and backup solutions, antivirus and firewall, router and UPnP setups, media streaming, and so much more on top of just offering up files on your network. The CPU is a powerful Intel dual-core CPU with 2GHz and both floating point and hardware encryption. This makes it a very fast unit and we barely saw any performance impact when encrypting our drives. That coupled with the 8GB RAM and you won't run out of performance anytime soon. The QvPC technology is amazing, it allows you to use the NAS directly as HTPC for browsing and media playback as well as playing games and more. Just attach a keyboard, mouse, and monitor and you're ready to go. On top of that, this NAS even comes with an infrared remote. But wait, there is more. You can also install any other operating system on the NAS that you'd like, in a virtual environment. May it be Linux, Android, Windows, or anything else - not a problem. That is just awesome. Dual LAN can be used for all methods of link aggregation and failover protection, but only if you don't use the Virtualization station as that will require one of the connections on its own. The USB 3.0 ports allow you to connect extra storage, printers, and much more. Pros: Great performance Intel 2GHz dual-core and 8GB RAM Hardware encryption Easy RAM and HDD access and installation Silent and small QvPC for VM and HTPC usage Dual LAN, USB 3.0, HDMI Cons: no eSATA Neutral VM needs a dedicated LAN port "The QNAP TS-453 mini is everything you know from other NAS', just a little bit better and a little bit smaller - and it's quite the looker at the same time." Thank you QNAP for providing us with this review sample.