QNAP TS-462 4-Bay 2.5 GbE NAS Review

How Much Does it Cost?

The QNAP TS-462 is available now from Amazon for £498.15 for the 4-bay with 2GB of RAM, and is also available as a 2-bay with 4GB of RAM for just £349. You can check for up-to-date stock and prices here.

Overview

It’s clear that QNAP has a quality product here, and I think the first thing that stands out about it is the design. A lot of NAS can look pretty brutal and industrial, or at the very least, they can look boring. However, QNAP has created a stylish product with a blend of white and rose gold that makes it aesthetically pleasing, so it won’t look ugly or boring in your home or office.

With the latest Intel Dual-Core design, it’s plenty fast for family use or a small business. The CPU can boost up to 2.9 GHz when needed, and with Intel Fast Sync, AES-Ni Encryption, and the addition of VNMe SSD M.2 caching, it’s extremely fast for a NAS of this size. If you’re running multiple users and/or systems to access files for video editing, game and data backups, and a multimedia server, it is unlikely to ever run into bottlenecks in that regard.

With four drive bays, it’s easy to pack in significant amounts of storage here, with the main limitation being your own budget. That being said, this isn’t a particularly cheap NAS to begin with, so will likely appeal to the most prosumer and enthusiast users rather than those looking for an affordable solution.

Of course, it’s a bit more expensive for good reason, with the NVMe caching support being a more premium feature, and the increased networking capabilities with the 2.5 GbE LAN option allowing you to really take advantage of increased read and write speeds from both faster drives, and RAID configurations that would give you higher speeds vs higher storage capacity. With the HDMI output, you can hook up a monitor for device management, or even just hook it straight up to a 4K60 TV if you so desire.

There are a lot of software features too, it’s not just about bulk storage. The NAS supports Qtier auto-tiering storage technology, supports Edge TPU, and features things like facial and object recognition with the QuMagie App, so you can take control of your personal cloud, rather than rely on services like Amazon or Google Photos for similar services.

Should I Buy One?

The QNAP Ts-462 is a more premium NAS solution, with robust configuration support allowing for 4 x HDD and 2 x NVMe SSD for massive performance increases. It’s a stylish-looking unit, but make no mistake, the underlying hardware is very much focused on great performance, able to support real-time transcoding, AI image recognition, and all the performance you need to max out the latest and greatest hard drives in whatever RAID configuration you require, and the fastest network support (2.5GbE) ensures you’ll see the benefit of this when dealing with larger file transfers and multiple users.