A SSD NAS of the Future Our QNAP TBS-h574TX Review

this Nas can take five of the new e1s edsff drives or m.2 drives it has 10 gig ethernet 2 and a half gig ethernet and Thunderbolt connectivity what's more it has a pretty fast CPU decent amount of memory it runs the fs with a nice gooey and you can even expand this thing there's a lot here so let's get to it hey guys this is Patrick from St and this is a qap TBS h57 4tx and let me be very clear we first saw this unit at computex 2023 in like June of last year May of last year and I absolutely thought this thing was one of the coolest nasas that I saw at the entire show it took a while and we were able to finally purchase one and it arrived and we've been testing it out for a little over a month now and I thought okay it's about time that we go do a review there are a ton of really good things in this Nas there's also some kind of like weird stuff and there's some stuff I don't really like and before we get too far in this I just want to say thank you to all the St YouTube members whove joined the channel and are helping to fund doing things like buying these little units so we can do our independent reviews but with that let's get to the hardware so we can go see how this thing works in a spectacular fashion okay so taking look at the NASA first thing I just want to point out is that this thing is pretty darn small it's also really nice I mean the chassis itself is made of plastic but also mostly metal and it is it feels pretty darn honk and heavy and the other thing I kind of like about it is that the shape of this unit is a little bit better I think than the Asus store unit that kind of looked like a you know PlayStation that was kind of sitting on its side or something like that it's just is kind of more of like a square shape versus the rectangle and just kind of wider width that Asus store by the way is going to be one of our primary points of comparison the reason for that is pretty simple that Asus store used m. 2 ssds and it also had 10 gig ethernet but I think that there's a pretty large set of folks that might rather have this qap and we're going to go into why in a little bit the other kind of cool feature just when we look look at the front is you're going to see that we have a USB 3.2 port and that's okay we're going to show you a cool use for that when we get to the back I also want to point out that we have a thunderbolt port on the front of this chassis now there are a lot of folks that are going to run this as an ass it's going to be in a closet and they're not going to care one Hoot about it but I do think that this is a product that you could see a you know someone that is running video editing or something like that and just kind of needs a Nas type environment I think that they could use something like this and if they did well that could be a useful feature now of course we also have our power LEDs and we have like our power button a copy button but I think one of the cooler features of this is this little front bezel because this front bezel has a little lock on the side you pop the lock down like this and then the little bezel pops off now behind that you're going to see our five Drive Bays this system has a total of five e1s SSD drive Bays but there's another little feature that's kind of cool so we'll start uh over here and we'll just kind of show you this is a kokia x D6 NVM SSD and this is e1s this is a way faster Drive than the system can handle but on the other hand you might want to go use these kind of e1s data center ssds if you just care about you know having high quality drives or something like that but qap in its Infinite Wisdom realizes that most folks are not going to have access to e1s ssds right now in fact even on the secondary Market they're not necessarily easy to find and so a lot of folks can get m.2 ssds and that is exactly what they have configured for all of these Drive Bays now one of the cool things is when you buy this system the original way that you get these Drive trays is pretty simple you get them and they all kind of look like this so what you get here is you get an m.2 slot and then you have your edsff connector on this side so if you use m.2 ssds your life is pretty simple you just plug them into the m.2 slot this is a toolless retention mechanism over here you just do that and you're ready to go you just plug this thing in super easy now if you use edsff it's actually not that hard for most strives all you're going to do is you're going to unscrew the m.2 carrier tray and all that kind of stuff put that aside and then screw in the drive and that's exactly how we have this kyia xt6 SSD here you can see that we have our little you know kind of front latching mechanism and then we have it just kind of screwed into the drive there are other versions of e1s ssds out there and there are different form factors you can get taller form factors you can get shorter form factors and one of the shorter form factors you can get is something like this now this is a Intel p451 I think SSD and uh we put it in and we tried originally kind of putting it into these kind of just the two screws that are there and it didn't work so instead what you have to do is you have to remove the m.2 connector or that like whole m.2 adapter and then you put this in the same mounting pattern as that m.2 adapter okay now I'm showing you this with three different drives right we have the kokia xt6 which are the high-end Enterprise e1s edsff drives we then have our high-end 8 tbte m.2 like sabrin SSD and then we have those kind of funky Intel P 451s um and those are funky for another reason now just kind of showing you this when they're up and running the Kyo ssds and the m.2 SSD have the drive indicator in one position and then the Intel drives have a drive indicator on the other guys I don't know what the heck is going on here usually Intel ssds were always really good at following standards but the fact that we see our two other types of drives and we actually tried another drive or two and they did the same thing as a kyia and the saberin m.2 drive I I I just don't understand why the heck we got drives with funky indicators it just it feels like edsff they were really close to coming with a really good specification but there are things like those Drive latches and like why the heck are the signals for the like activity lights in the wrong place on this one I don't know guys but I just kind of wish that they did a little bit better job just something that if you are using a mixed set of drives you should watch out for now the connectivity to these drives is better than we saw on the Asus store units each Drive gets pcie gen 3x two to the drive and frankly that's okay at best now it's definitely nowhere near fast enough to take the full wire speed from all of these drives or like each Drive individually we have like PCI Gen 4 drives that can run at full PCI gen 4X four speeds but we can't run anywhere near that in fact we're like a quarter of that speed in this chassis so I don't know how I feel about that on one hand you know if you're using e1s drives and you're spending all the extra money for that I don't necessarily love the fact that you're being curtailed in terms of your performance by just so much and the flips side to it is the way that the Asus store folks did it where they have pcie gen 3x1 to the drives the advantage there is that you just get more capacity so for spending more money on a nice qap system like this where you get a better processor and all that kind of stuff you still end up with a solution where you only have five drives okay now let's get to the back of the system because there's a lot more going on back here so a couple things that you're going to notice first we have both a 10 gig Port as well as a 2 and 1/2 gig Port you also will see another Thunderbolt Port now one thing you don't get with this Nas is a thunderbolt cable so you're going to have to go buy buy one of these if you want to use one of the big headline features of this Nas on the side you also get two more USB type A ports now on the back we also have our power input and an HDMI port this does use an external power brick which is kind of a bummer but it's a little fsp 120 watt unit and for folks who care it's a 19v power adapter which is pretty common in the industry although I know a lot of folks just like 12vt for a number of reasons instead overall one thing is for sure this has much better connectivity than the the Asus store Nas for all of the like you know ports like the Thunderbolt ports also just having 10 gig and 22 gig I mean there there's a lot going on here guys on the other hand and something that's kind of bummer is that this only has five Drive bays and so you can't put six or 12 drives in it which limits the capacity and also on the limiting side you have to pick the processor and memory configuration at the time of order inside of the system there's a core I3 I think it's a 13 20p and that is an a core processor but it has four P cores four e cores and so you get a total of 12 threads and the other feature that you get is you get 12 GB of memory now this memory is not upgradeable so you kind of get what you get in it and to me that's a bummer 12 gigs of memory in 2024 just kind of kind of feels a little bit low when you have a core I3 like that should be at least 16 gigs but on a system like this if you really want it to be a server I would kind of want to see 32 gigs but that's not even an option here at $1,199 I really wish that there was another 4 gigs of memory in this core I3 configuration now one thing that you can do is you can get more memory and get 16 GB of memory and a core i5 processor there is a version of this with the core i5 1340 PE and that gives you the same 4 P cores but you also get 8 e cores your graphics because of the configuration is also upgraded to the iris XE graphics and uh and you get your 16 G memory but it's also much more expensive I think that one was like $15.99 or so so those prices I think that one of the things that I would go back to is just the fact that you know you're spending a minimum $1,200 to connect five ssds which is over $200 a SSD to just connect it to the system it's just kind of why I feel like I would want to get a little bit more connectivity in a platform like this but on the other hand we don't have the core i5 version so I can't really compare that right now okay so let's talk really quickly about setting this unit up there's Wizards and all kinds of stuff it's pretty darn easy one of the things that you're going to see though is that you do use qts hero but one of the really nice things about the whole qap setup experience is just frankly the fact that the user interface is super easy now of course I don't really mind managing ZFS from a CLI I've been doing it for years so I feel pretty comfortable doing that myself you know there are a lot of folks that just want the easy mode ZFS that this offers compared to some other Solutions like tress that's a ZFS solution sure but this is just a little bit easier to use now of course because this is qap you get an app store there's tons of apps and I'll let you kind of go do research on that yourself on what you might want to use but you can also run things like containers and also virtual machines on there if you are a VMware customer and we just did a video on this and you're a small customer and you just want a you know you need a couple low power VMS to run um you know you can actually just run it on a Nas like this and not have to pay crazy VMware costs anymore okay so let's talk about the performance of this like frankly guys this thing when you have five ssds even if they're pcie gen 3x two connectivity I mean you have plenty of performance for the system or plenty of drive performance to go and drive a full 10 gig connection and drive like you know your 10 gig connection and your 2 AFK connection at wire speed even if you're in raid you're not going to really have a problem with that and frankly the core I3 processor that's in this is way more powerful than even like what you would see in giant 1 pyte arrays from just a couple years ago right so the fact of the matter is that like you know the core I3 it may seem like a big downgrade versus The Core i5 even if you're just going to run this as an ass and have a couple of light VMS or containers or something like that a couple apps running on this thing you're going to be plenty fine with the core I3 I think that the core i5 is if you really also need that extra Ram so you want to have 16 GB of RAM uh you know I think that's a good reason to get the core i5 but on the other hand I also think that they missed a huge opportunity not to go up and have like a 32 gig option and have this be like a 16 gig option I don't know why they didn't do that especially when you're charging something like you know another $400 for the core i5 or something like that but I think it's really important to talk about the power consumption as well as the noise of this so let's get to that next okay so let's talk really Qui quickly about the power consumption and noise that kind of go hand inand also want to talk a little about the cooling of the drives in this system so I have this hooked up and I'm using the HDMI output on the nas to go and display on the screen behind me and with five e1s drives installed we're getting somewhere in that 33 to about 38 watt range at idle now the idle power consumption does Jump Around quite a bit and we can see when certain process kick up that power consumption go well into the 50 wat range now the other thing though is that this is an idle nass it's not necessarily under load but depending on the kinds of drives that you have that could be a couple Watts extra maybe 10 or so or it could be a little bit more than that now something I want to point out though is that the noise when we look at the noise meter we're getting somewhere in that 38 to maybe 41 DBA range depending on exactly what's going on in the system now the challenge is it is not silent and I'm maybe you know a meter or so away from the unit right now the back's a little further from me and I can definitely hear this thing as I'm speaking I don't know if you guys are going to be able to hear it on the audio it's not like a high pitch wine it's a kind of low one so I think you know it becomes just background noise and if you have a loud desktop then you you probably won't even notice it but sitting close to it you definitely notice it but while we have this all set up I wanted to show you a couple things that I think you're going to think are quite interesting so this Nas is at idol there's not a whole lot stored on here but just taking a look real quick at the overall temperatures you'll see that our kyia xd6 SSD that's installed that thing's running at about 52° C now that's not necessarily high or low but it does owe to the fact that it has the larger 9 1 12 millim size and so it's getting cooled decently well in this now if I were to click over to one of the Intel drives you're going to see that we're closer to around 60° C we've definitely seen that go up and also go down over time but it's usually in maybe that 59 to 60° celsus range and you know while we have this screen up I want to show you another fun thing you can do with this now I'm going to just throw in a couple drives uh into a little forb this is the qap tr004 enclosure that we did a review of not too Longo on the St main site but this is spinning up right now but we have a USB cable that's just going to that front USB type a port and what you'll see in not too long is that our storage we're actually going to get an external storage array okay after a few seconds of this Bo booting up and connecting to the little Nas that we have over there getting the USB enclosure online we see that it becomes part of the drives that we have available now so you'll see here that we have two Seagate 20 terab drives and those things are running at about 22° C the cool thing about this is that we actually do get the smart data and the location information with the enclosure into the management interface so even though this is not part of the main Nas you're going to see it here and the other really cool thing is we know which Drive Bays these drives correspond to to because we're in the qap ecosystem you can see over here that the two drives are lit up in green now of course something that I think a lot of folks are going to use maybe this whole setup for or they may just use the nas for is to connect to something like a Macbook and use a thunderbolt 4 connection and that's something that I think a lot of folks are just going to do so I wanted to show you what that looks like here and now that the Mac is connected you're going to see that we got automatically assigned an IP address for our Thunderbolt 4 Port so we have a thunderbolt Fort between the mac and the qap it's already set up and super easy to get installed and by the way this thing is not hooked into the network so this is the only connectivity is the local connectivity that I have things plugged into now in case you're wondering about what the total power is now on this little box um you know now just being clear that the jbod this is on its own power adapter but what we see on our power consumption right here is that we're getting somewhere in maybe the 60 to about 78 watt range with that let's get key lessons learn okay so we had a lot in this review but let's talk a little bit about the key Lessons Learned I mean what do we learn from this thing so I think my big things are one from a performance perspective even this core I3 version is absolutely awesome the core I3 has plenty of performance for your four drives and ZFS and all that kind of stuff it doesn't really matter what you run it in the fact of the matter is you have plenty of performance to go push 10 gig also tun and half gig and also used 10 gig on the Thunderbolt ports as much as I wish that the core I3 came with 16 GB of memory CU that would have only cost a couple extra dollars and would have made it more useful for things like running a VM or app or something like that a little extra I I do think it's a nice processor and overall it's pretty darn good I understand why you need to have airflow over e1s and m.2 ssds but I don't necessarily like the fact that you can hear these fans they should be silent or near silent especially on the core I3 version cuz that's kind of our lower-end version I can't even imagine what the core i5 version would be like and that wouldn't really bother me as much if this was designed to be like a Nas that would be sitting in a closet or something like that instead this is a Nas with Thunderbolt connectivity it's advertised with Thunderbolt connectivity and really the idea is that if you have a Mac or something like that you can go plug this thing in and lo and behold you now have a pretty fast Nas with direct Thunderbolt connectivity which gives you another 10 gig link without going over the network so as much as I like the overall function of this what I don't like is the fact that it only has five drive base let's say that you use 4 TB drives in these now you're only going to have 20 terabyt total and 20 terabytes is as much as a single hard drive these days so it might be faster but it's not necessarily a ton of capacity and a lot of people want capacity in their nests and if you use 8 tab drives number one the m.2 drives are super expensive the edsff drives you can buy they're also kind of costly but those 8 tby drives they only get you 40 terab raw or I should say around 40 terab raw so to me if you used .2 drives people would have access to much larger drives I mean you can get the 15 16 terabyte class drives and you can find those things for under $1,000 now and so that would make this now 80 terabyt and if you just wanted to go all out and just get more capacity this would be very expensive but you could go and just use the 61.4 terab drives and five of those gives you over 300 terabytes so just to me even if you only had five drives I kind of would prefer the u.2 drives versus something like this with the edsff and m.2 I do however love the way that they did the m.2 in this because it's super easy to just go and put m.2 drives in here I love that but if we are using m.2 then I kind of want to have more drives so I can have more capacity but that's just me I love to hear what you guys think so definitely if you have thoughts on that go put it in the comments down below we'll also have links to all of the stuff whether it's the unit the US speed enclosure that we showed you earlier the cable that we use for Thunderbolt and all that kind of stuff we'll have all that down in the description but if you did like this video why don't you share with your friends but also give it a like click 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Channel: ServeTheHome

Views: 237,275

Keywords: servethehome, serve the home, asustor, flashstor, m.2 ssd, m.2 nas, m.2 ssd nas, 10gbe nas, 2.5gbe, 2.5gbe nas, crucial, crucial p3 plus, fs6706t, fs6712x, asus, asustor flashstor, flash nas, ssd nas, qnap, qnap switch, kioxia, tbs-h574tx, intel, core i3, core i3-1320pe, core i5, core i5-1340pe, tbs-h574tx-i3-12g, tbs-h574tx-i5-16g, sabrent, ssd, e1.s, e1.s nas, edsff nas, thunderbolt, thunderbolt nas, kioxia xd6, p4511

Id: gIFAbKxDAoU

Length: 19min 43sec (1183 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 04 2024