QNAP TS-451+-8G 4 Bay Desktop High-performance NAS Enclosure - 8 GB RAM, Intel Celeron 2.0 GHz Quad Core Processor - Supporting HDMI, Transcoding and Virtualization, Black

I've upgraded from a Netgear RreadyNAS, and also, I took the option of build my own, ie. I source the drives and memory separately (it's cheaper!), but obviously, have to spend a bit time to build the unit, took about an hour, so wasn't too long. First, this is very quiet, no more white noise humming in the background, just the occasional disks activities, so great! The software is very good, it's basically a linux unit, so you can do a lot with it, or not. I've chosen to use it as NAS with some of the built-in functions, but most others will be running in an Ubuntu VM in the NAS. So this VM is my home server, running mail / web etc. and it will start automatically when the NAS boots up. If you are not a technie, it's confusing, 'cause there are a lot of options & setup, and I've noticed, if some of the services are not working as expected, restart them. Overall, great piece of kit, does everything I want and more!

If you are looking for a NAS box, then it is a complex activity, that the QNAP makes more difficult by being more than just a simple NAS drive. As a NAS drive performance seems to be good, but it I am spotting issues moving small files from one part of the drive to another. Setup was relatively easy, complicated by my laptop running a company managed local firewall, which I had to disable briefly to be able to talk to the box. Also would recommend that you lock the IP address from your router to the QNAP, it will save you time and reduce effort. The QNAP isn't however, just a NAS drive. It is also a media server, with built in music and video capabilities and far more. The problem is, some of this capability isn't that easy to use and setup and the help files are pretty poor, in my honest opinion. So, music and internet radio is really easy to setup and move music from your laptops to the NAS box (make sure that you have your metadata sorted out, especially on compilation albums, otherwise it will not come up properly). however, some features that you will find on other music systems (like Bose for instance) aren't there, so being able to separate your music from that of your kids for instance is not that easy to do, as yes you may like some of their stuff, but equally, you will not want to get 20 songs of theirs when you are on shuffle!!! Video play back, I am having problems with. I have video's, but when I move them to the QNAP, the quality drops significantly and I am still trying to fix this. This box is powerful, but the power is being impaired with poor help

What can I say. What a monster of a little machine. Very solidly built. Fantastic OS software that is frequently updated. Very easy to setup. Has the great addition of a HDMI cable to plug into a TV or monitor. I was very surprised that it has an easy to use app store with loads of free software that turn this puppy into things you could only dream of. Very stable and after a months usage it have never been unavailable or busy on my LAN which has been a common trend for other cheaper underpowered devices I have had in the past. I decided to go for the QNAP instead of a Synology and spend the money I saved on extra RAM and HDDs. So far I really have nothing negative to say about this very solid, well thought out, professional kit. It has already saved my bacon when I had to do a complete restore of one of my PC system drives. Buy with complete confidence because it is money well invested.

Works very well. Very happy with this purchase. Bought this after a disastrous accidental deletion of all my movies, songs and photos on my external drive (thankfully recovered them back) - but this was definitely the time to invest in a proper NAS. Have spent probably years looking at NAS setups and never making a decision, then saw this and was sold. I have been searching for something that can properly run PLEX media server with transcoding for our home theatre setup, and this really does work. It has ran simultaneously 2 x 1080p transcoding sessions and not broken a sweat, which is really saying something for a NAS. Remained almost perfectly quiet throughout also! Can be used as a home media system in and of itself with the HDMI output and included remote control, although we prefer our Apple TV setup with streaming. Integrates well with our network with no hassles, and on the whole the software is not difficult to use (although it would be nice to have a better search options on it). If yo are after a cheap-ish NAS for PLEX then this is definitely the way forward.

This is the second one of these I have purchased. They do what it says on the tin. Nice and reliable. The market place option made it a no brainer.

The unit itself is well put together and has good features. It can even (unofficially) be upgraded to 16GB of RAM. However the Intel processors used in these units (Celeron J1900) have numerous hardware bugs that were never fixed. After a period of time, this causes the unit to fail prematurely. Google : intel celeron j1900 LPC clock bug for more details.

Setup was pretty good and worked straight away. But pretty fast, once up and running you are left to make a lot of decisions abut what apps to load, difficult quaetions about transcoding and so on. Good news if you know what you are doing, but after paying a fair amount of money for the box and the disks, you don't want a naggign fealing you are not using it fully. Media streaming seems good, which was one of the reaosns I chose it, I like the web-baed interface, it is responsive and pleasant. Not getting the same throughput as my previous netgear device, but unlike the netgear it has not crashed. Have not used it as a personal cloud yet.

Moved from a Synology DS212j as it was becoming a little slow for what I wanted to do. This model offers superb value for money, offering a processor many times faster than the equivalently priced Synology at around the same price. I upgraded the RAM myself to 8Gb, which is pretty easy to do, although you have to be a little careful about which memory module you buy (but you don't need a QNAP one). Interface is snappy and I can run much more intensive applications (like virtualisation and Plex). If you're used to administering a Synology, you'll have no trouble with a QNAP; they're quite similar in terms of OS. Very highly recommended!