QNAP NAS - Before You Buy

[Music] hello and welcome back to part two of before you buy today i want to talk about qnap nas again one of the brands i talk about on this channel quite a lot personally they are the one that i fell in love with first when it comes to all the different brands in network attached storage over the years they are very much the more trend setter for me in terms of certainly in terms of hardware and definitely more and more in terms of software they're brands that bring a lot of this new innovations in nas to the uh you know to the whole field of servers first you've seen suffering thunderbolt nas from them the very first ones to crack that they were some of the earliest brands to really introduce some of those higher 10 gbe connections on more affordable levels and the innovations on the software level have become have been coming fast and strong over the last few years seeing more and more and innovative ways in which you can interact with your data in you know things that we wouldn't have even considered once which are now mainstream and with their brand new zfs file system uh in quts hero arriving with commercial grade home nazis and small business and prosumers having access to qnap applications on the zfs platform they are a brand that has challenged a lot of the preconceptions of data storage making it far more interesting but they are not for everyone hence why today's video before you buy five things that you need to know about qnap and qnap nas before you buy doesn't mean they're a bad brand this is not about rubbishing a brand it's about you being informed as a consumer in what you are buying so the first thing you need to know about qnap nas as a brand is when you first boot it up if you don't have a vast amount of technical knowledge it can be very overwhelming it's not overwhelming the kind of i hate this but when you first boot the device up and you've installed qts there are quite a lot of things on screen immediately thrown at you almost every application will pop up and say do you need a hand here's a quick start guide quick flick through these and i'll tell you how it works and that isn't for everyone some applications when you open up for the first time a little tutorial never hurts but perhaps a pop-up that would say do you need a hand click yes and then it shows you would be good but otherwise when you boot a qnap nas all too often you boot an application for the first time it bombards you trying to help you and that in itself can be very very frictional everything from the resource monitor really throwing a lot of information a number of you that you may not be aware of to the applications throwing you as much help as you want and recommended applications and recommended actions for you can be a little bit overwhelming and although their platform is still pretty user friendly for the most part it's not quite up there with the likes of synology in terms of finding a nice balance between hand holding and overwhelming you in the face so do bear that in mind with a qnap that although it is relatively straightforward to set up and you know the applications are very very good it will bombard you with a lot more information than most naz brands on day one now going back to the subject of innovation the second thing you might want to know about qnap nas as a brand and if you do invest in a qnap nas is often yes they're incredibly innovative and yes they have broken the mold in a number of nas hardware and indeed software features before anyone else but arguably sometimes they get there a little too soon they introduce a lot of hardware and software early doors and then you start utilizing it and it's not quite as fluid and as stable as you'd like they generally always iron out the wrinkles within the first six to twelve months and again that is when it comes to um thunderbolt now as it is when it comes to a lot of the applications um with uh pressure recognition and qbr face and stuff like that a lot of their applications from virtual jabra to hybrid mount to cue maggie the photo recognition software to their virtual machine platform to linux station to the lot they have brought a lot of these hardware and software innovations to the table but often when they arrive early doors they're not as smooth as you'd like and they do seem like a little bit rushed sometimes they do feel that way and some of that some of that hardware is brought to the table so fast that you feel when you do get your hands on it that a little bit longer spent on it or being released a little later might have been for the benefit they do get there in the end but when we look at things like the front mounted usb um access they had a whole system where their nazis had a usb dash port on them so you could directly connect to it like a daz while usb 3 sounded great but it wasn't as plug and play as it appeared and the number of you did find that you weren't getting usb 3 speeds by that ip protocol the same goes for this system of um the combo cards the qm2 series the qm2 series from tuner to me is one of the best things they've done in terms of accessories now with a huge array of ssd cash cards 10 gb cards multiple and combo cards to add nvme ssd cash and um the 10 gb on the outside but when they were released the pcie didn't seem as evolved as it could be and as the cards have released over time they've got better and better and better but when they brought it to market first there's no design it did feel like you weren't getting its fullest potential you're getting an idea but it didn't feel like it was its fullest ebb and that's something with the qnap innovation you should be aware of early doors the first thing the third thing is to do with the priority in terms of support of their software and hardware they do have an extensive array of applications in quts and a number of the applications they have are genuinely breathtaking when it comes to your center game this does everything you know um hybrid backup sync 3 easily still one of the best backup tools out there virtualization station fan bloody tastic in terms of its support of virtual machines but you do get that feeling when you use a number of the applications that as soon as they bring the application to market they are very keen to go oh it works with this third-party hardware software it works with all of this third-party stuff and you do find more and more that although the core applications are qnap they do go to great length to say we will take it this far use your third party we see it uh in the utilization of opening office files for example although they've got file station um uh q filing and q search after that you suddenly have to use microsoft office there's a plug in there which is great by the way but it would have been nice for qnap to have their own office package there same goes for the surveillance they don't do their own cameras they do all of their software they do some great stuff in qbr pro but after that you still have to use third-party cameras and there's more and more instances when it comes like they utilize skype in some cases when they talk about roon server quite a lot an enormous degree of support or flex media server you get this feeling that they do have a tendency to lean on the third-party developers in terms of support and collaboration quite a lot now that's not a bad thing for everyone a number of us you know from our sonos sound system to our amazon firestick you know we bloody love using our own third-party stuff a lot of the time but you do want that feeling that it's a choice not a necessity and sometimes it does feel that way with a lot of the qnap platform another thing you should know about qnap nas as a brand if you're going to invest in their hardware solutions is the range is enormous of all the nas brands i talk about here on the channel their range is you know and again literally exhaustive you will go through it and and that sounds like a non-club mature but you know trust me it's a word you um will look at their range and go wow i want to buy four bay why is there so many four bays and there are there i've got four bays with 32-bit arm processors 64-bit irm processors 1gb 2.5 gbe 10 gbe then you go to your intel based processors there they've got two or three different versions of four base then from the intel's you guarantee amd's your amd's you're going to until course your intel of course you go to your xeons there are just so many four bays and that's just four bay what about two and six and eight and rack mount qnap has a huge range of solutions which on the one hand is a very good thing because it allows you to really tailor your budget beautifully so you can say i've got two grand to spend i want to spend the lion's share on this kind of functionality and less on this their hardware portfolio allows you to scale your budget very very well in terms of memory in terms of cpu in terms of base in terms of functionality and what it can do multi-user five user 10 user 50 user but it's a lot of information to take in on day one and there aren't a lot of buyers guides above and beyond my own arrogantly he said that allow you to funnel you know quite frankly hundreds and hundreds of solutions down to a simple three or four and it's something that qnap really needs to work on as a brand you can't bring that many solutions to the table and not allow people an easy way to filter it down than a few drop-down boxes the last thing you should probably know about qnap as a brand and this comes kind of hand-in-hand with that whole system of prioritizing um your budget generally with qnap you do find they have shorter warranties this is something we're seeing less and less such as the 53 d series arriving with three years of warranty and a number of their other newer solutions around with three years and some of the rack mounts again arriving with five years of warranty but they still generally arrive with shorter warranties than a number of their contemporaries and the biggest uh comparison i would make there is the synology xs series that's their enterprise grade stuff and their rackmount stuff pretty much every synology rat mount is three years warranty and any access system has got five years of manufacturer's warranty that is something you don't see as much on cue now the way they scale it is the price of the devices are a little lower overall but you can buy warranty upgrade so it allows you again to scale your purchase but there's a lot of different warranties and there's different warranty um packets they're color coded to every different nas system and although you do make a saving if you don't want to plow your money into long-term warranties it's still confusing as hell and it still leans into that idea that is an enormous array uh to go through they have got a huge worldwide presence they've got offices probably more worldwide offices than most of the other brands i'm going to talk about in these things you need to know videos but there's still no avoiding that they are a brand that although they're quick to the punch early doors will often bring this tech to the table 1995 done and fix it on route and a lot of that does come across when you do read about a lot of the hardware it's still a great platform for me still easily sharing you know they are joint first place with synology in my heart but there's a lot of things you need to know about qnap to make sure you are buying the right nas for you thank you so much for watching do check out these videos as i go through more and more nas brands and if you do enjoy this click like it really helps me understand what you guys like and helps me make more videos like this for you click subscribe if you want to learn more buy you now some spam visit me at nascompares.com for all the guides and i will see you next time

Channel: NASCompares

Views: 29,827

Keywords: NAS Server, NAS Drive, NAS Guide, QNAP, QNAP NAS Drive, QNAP NAS Server, network attached storage, nas drive, Best QNAP NAS, Mac NAS, NAS Drive Review, NAS vs Cloud, QNAP nas, QNAP server, QNAP drive, QNAP backup, QNAP raid, QNAP plex, QNAP CLOUD, PLEX, QNAP SUPPORT

Id: vi6xykGX1VA

Length: 11min 52sec (712 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 28 2020