As a YouTuber, video editor, photographer, aspiring voice over artist, data hoarder,
and general content creator - I use a lot of hard drive space.
A LOOOOT of drive space.
Video footage of ongoing project, archived video footage from important projects, family
photos, professional photos, raw WAVs of voice recordings, movies, TV shows - terabytes upon
terabytes of data.
Following me filling pretty much every drive I had earlier this year, my main YouTube storage
array - a foolish leftover Raid0 array - crashed.
I lost a ton of footage, about a month or two worth of work, along with about a month
of downtime trying to fix everything and get set back up.
It was time for an upgrade.
Enter part 1 of me getting serious about file storage - my QNAP TS-451A.
This thing is a boss.
QNAP reached out and offered to send it over for review, so I went ahead and grabbed some
refurbished 2TB drives from Newegg on eBay.
Loaded it up into a basic JBOD array, copied over some files and fell in love with the
performance.
So much so, that I wound up deleting some of the footage I had stored on the device
just in time for my unit to die.
The 4th drive slot kept dropping out, sending the unit into very loud beeping and continuously
unmounting and re-mounting my array.
QNAP quickly replaced my unit and the new one has worked perfectly since, so I’ll
write that up to bad luck - but still worth noting that this happened.
The TS-451A (these NAS units always have such lovely names) features a dual core Intel Celeron
CPU with a base clock of 1.6 GHz, and 2GB or 4GB of RAM.
Mine has 4GB.
Taking a tour of the front, we have indicator LEDs for… just about everything, a SD card
slot, a power button, a button to automatically copy footage from the SD card - something
I’d use more if I didn’t need ALL of the storage on the unit for archives already,
I’ll work on this during future upgrade videos - and a USB 3.0 port for connecting
external hard drives.
Below that, there’s also a micro USB female end as well for their “Direct access”
connectivity - more on that later.
We’re also greeted with the 4 drive bays.
These are easy to install and remove, and overall setup was a breeze with tool-less
hard drive mounting.
The sides and top are barren, with the bottom containing 4 great rubber feet.
Around back, we have a lot of fun stuff.
There’s a big, but quiet cooling fan, kensington lock, reset button and maintenance port - oh
wait, that’s not the fun stuff.
There’s two gigabit ethernet ports - which can come in quite handy for the plethora of
features available to this thing - HDMI video out, 3.5mm audio out and audio in, two more
USB 3.0 ports, and the DC power input.
That’s a lot of I/O for this thing.
Compared to the little single-drive WD NAS units I used to use, this thing is awesome,
and basically a computer.
Oh yeah, it also has an IR receiver and a freaking remote control for the media center
functionality of it.
Not bad.
Load it up with some hard drives and connect it to your network and it’s time to dive
into the software.
I do want to go ahead and re-iterate that this is, essentially, a computer.
The capabilities and functionality built into the software are a lot more than I could ever
fully explore in one video, or just in my own usage of the device.
The base software is a web-accessible OS that reminds me a lot of Android.
Intuitive and easy to use.
Then you have a variety of different “Stations” for using the device, and a plethora of “apps”
to download and install to do even more with the NAS.
There’s stations for streaming media over the network to watch your movies and TV shows,
to stream music as an iTunes server, to backup computers in your home, to be a cloud drive
accessible anywhere, manage surveillance cameras in your home, and even run virtual machines!
It’s pretty crazy.
Diving into the App Center, there’s email servers, real-time antivirus scanning, Google
Apps management, Azure storage, the ever-popular Plex, lots of syncing and backup apps, web
server apps, WordPress, bittorrent clients, games - more than I’ll ever be able to fully
explore.
It’s pretty crazy.
When I first got the unit set up, I went nuts and installed everything I thought I could
have fun with, but my current, ongoing configuration is much more simple.
I mainly just utilize the normal file system - accessible on my computers over the network,
I have mounted network shares and network drives - the antivirus app for occasional
scans, Transmission for testing torrent downloads, JsTetris (because Tetris), and then the Linux
Station for running VMs.
I also use the “Connect to Cloud Drive” app, which allows me to easily connect to
my Dropbox, Google Drive, and Amazon Cloud Drive to back up files.
Since I use this NAS primarily as my footage and YouTube archive, this makes it relatively
easy to back up my footage to Amazon.
There’s some issues copying files sometimes, but it’s very handy.
I’m still in the early stages of tinkering with the Linux Station & Virtualization Station
VM managers, and I want to do a dedicated video on them - but I will say that it’s
quite easy to set up and manage VMs, and you can connect to them through your web browser
or a VNC client.
I’m really looking forward to utilizing this for future videos.
This is where, to me, the dual ethernet ports come in really handy: You can have one set
of functions, like normal file copying, go over the first ethernet port while your VM
connects over the second and isn’t impacted as much by network performance.
I love it, I just wish I had more gigabit switches, or just a bigger one.
Running a graphical OS like ElementaryOS on Virtualization Station resulted in a fairly
laggy experience, whereas running in the Linux Manager app was much more responsive and the
display outputted over the device’s HDMI, which is pretty neat.
As far as Plex goes - I wasn’t super worried about this since I didn’t have the extra
space to put my media library on this specific device anyway, and I already have a Plex server
running on my video render server - video on that soon.
To test it, I did set up a library of my YouTube upload original files and tried playing a
few.
It has 0 problems streaming the original files over the network whatsoever, though it does
eat up some CPU usage.
Transcoding to a different resolution and compression, however, has never seemed to
work.
It just loads for a long time and then eventually tells me that the video cannot be played.
The “Video Station” app on the other hand does a lot better job with actually transcoding
and playing the media, but is a lot harder to use and set up.
Frankly, it was much easier to just play the direct files over
the network.
Performance on the whole holds up well - running Plex and a VM pegs CPU usage in the 90 percent
range, but things remain fairly responsive throughout.
Playing a game like JsTetris seems to have virtually no performance impact, which is
cool.
There’s a great little Dashboard pop up tool that shows you a lot of information - uptime,
disk status, connected users, network traffic, CPU and RAM usage, disk space allocation,
and so on.
I use it a lot.
The unit remains fairly quiet, too, especially hidden under my desk on top of a PC tower.
Also, did I mention you can occupy all 3 USB 3.0 ports with external hard drives and share
them over the network, too?
I can’t get enough network storage, and that will come up in future storage upgrade
videos.
Lastly, I guess I would be remiss if I didn’t discuss the main gimmicky feature for this
NAS unit - the “direct connection” USB 3.0 connection on the device.
Since this is a full computer and NAS, the ability to hook it up just as an external
hard drive can’t really be done.
Instead, the software for it creates a virtual network connection to the NAS over the USB
bus.
This is good if you can’t set up a wired network connection for some reason, but won’t
give you full USB 3.0 speeds like a normal external hard drive.
This isn’t something I’m ever really going to use - so I will instead point you to a
video by Lon Seidman, who reviewed the 2-bay model of this device and showed just how this
functionality works.
On the whole, I’m very happy with this NAS.
My only limitations are my upload speed for backing up files, and my financial ability
to buy bigger hard drives for it.
The kind of mass storage I need is way too expensive for my wallet, whereas just a few
TB for an average home or enthusiast user is totally affordable.
The problem, then, comes from the price of this device itself - almost $500 from what
I’m seeing online.
That’s quite expensive for something you still have to populate with hard drives, at
least to me.
NAS units are at this weird point where the whole setup is too expensive for the average
user, despite being a useful home tool for just about anyone.
They do have expansion bays that you can hook up to it, as well, which I hope I can look
into at some point.
This concludes part 1 of my storage upgrade series, and my review of the QNAP TS-451A
NAS.
My important footage archive and YouTube upload archive both rest comfortably within the 8TB
I loaded up into the NAS, and it’s backing up to Amazon Cloud Drive almost constantly.
I’m pretty happy with it, and maybe you will be, too.
If you enjoyed this video, smash the like button, get subscribed for more tech videos,
and I’ll see you next time.