QNAP Turbo NAS TS-453 Pro 4-Bay NAS Review

Final Thoughts

Pricing

The QNAP Turbo NAS TS-453 Pro has shown that it’s a powerhouse and such a performance will cost a premium. You can pick up one of these great NAS units at NewEgg for $680. I found plenty of the 2GB RAM models in the UK, but few  with 8GB. Amazon does have it for £539.27 and German readers can find deals starting at 618.95 through Geizhals.

If that should be a little much, then you might be more interested in the 2GB model that you can find at NewEgg for $565.99, Scan UK for £408.48, or Geizhals where it begins at €499.86.

Overview

Where do I start, there is so much to tell about QNAP’s TS-453 Pro NAS. Let us just start with the design. We get a conventional looking NAS that easily blends into the surroundings while still giving you a quick view and access to all the relevant information and parts. It is a solidly built unit from the hardware and parts inside to the enclosure itself. It isn’t light and when packed with four drives it will stand firmly and secure on the four large feet, even on angled surfaces.

Having a quad-core 2GHz processor gives us a wide array of flexibility on what and how much we want to run. No enthusiast or SMB should run into any sort of throttling due to CPU limitations and coupled with the support for hardware encryption and media encoding you have all the power you need. The 8GB RAM in this model also help a lot when running VMs, databases, and other memory-hungry apps.

All that power has to go somewhere and the TS-453 Pro channels that into a great drive performance coupled with four LAN ports to give plenty of bandwidth for a lot of simultaneous users.

There are plenty of security features to go along with it, starting with physical locks. But the software part is also covered well with backup solutions for local, remote, and cloud backups. File syncing, Antivirus, and military grade encryption is also available on the TS-453 Pro.

The simple but beautiful design also embeds a display for easy information access and settings. The one-touch copy button eases regular backup processes and it comes with more apps available than you probably ever will need. The only thing I feel is missing a little bit on a unit like this is the eSATA, but QNAP opted for USB 3.0 for their expansion enclosures and that’s not bad either.

Pros:

• Great performance
• HTPC and Virtualization Station
• Quad-core CPU and 8GB RAM
• 4 LAN ports
• USB 3.0 scaleable
• 80Plus Bronze certified PSU
• Land of plenty when it comes to apps

Cons:

• no eSATA

“QNAP’s TS-453 Pro is probably one of the nicest and well rounded NAS units on the market. You get plenty of performance, massive amount of options and can save yourself the HTPC altogether. It’s not the cheapest, but it’s worth every penny.”

Thanks to QNAP for providing us with this review sample.