QNAP QTS 5.0 NAS Software Review - Worthy Of Your Data?

i'm not sure how i feel about this dude in the corner here he's there he's watching all the time he's pretending to help us with our memory concerned he's letting us know that we've got sufficient memory but i'm not sure i'm not sure i trust him something about those eyes [Music] hello and welcome back to my review of qnap qts 5.0 the full release version and possibly one of the longest videos i've ever made here on the channel as it stands i'm looking at all my notes here and all my testing i've done before but you there listening to this right now can look at the bottom of the screen and see just how long this video is going to be now this is my review of qnap's own qts 5.0 software and services platform it's what's included with every qnap nas it's the latest version 5.0 and depending on the model you have and the power of the unit you have your experience may differ slightly but today's video is designed to where possible target most users of qnap now systems both new and old throughout this video it's worth mentioning that there's going to be lots of different things i'm going to be looking at we'll be looking at security control storage backups multimedia vm surveillance design the works of qgs 5.0 and it's going to be a long video but before we go any further it's worth highlighting a bunch of disclaimers you can fast forward this this is probably going to take me a couple of minutes but it's important you understand that how this review is going to be conducted and more importantly what is not going to be included in this review because as big as this video is it still can't be long enough to cover all of the features and functionality of any nas software not qnap not any platform so first and foremost the target of this video is for people that are either completely new to the qnap nas platform or have a very light understanding a number of you that have been using the platform for a few years are almost certainly going to be saying that i overlook certain things and where possible i will highlight everything i can but i've got to keep it with a nice fine line between new and old um qnap followers who maybe don't understand the platform as much as they might like to secondly i'm not really going to be focusing on anything more than the desktop platform so for example i'm not going to be looking at here the q finder pro software you just saw which finds nas software on the on the background i am later on going to be using the surveillance client application qvr pro client but only really to show off the surveillance features i'm not going to be looking at any mobile apps any dlna apps no apps for um android ios i'm not going to be looking at desktop client apps all of those are available there's loads out there i'm only going to be looking at access through your web browser and in this case today i am using uh google chrome next up this video is being conducted on a tvs 872 xt now sorry x now again this is quite high for looting nas but do bear in mind that not only am i only using the um qts version rather than quts zfs version but on top of that i'm only using 8 gig of memory the main reason i've chosen this nas over the 653d or other qnap nas is is because i'm going to be showing a lot of features simultaneously so it's worth highlighting although i'm going to show you a lot of stuff today you're going to need a powerful nas to run all of these services simultaneously you'll probably get away with most of them more than half of them at once but bear in mind that in order to show you all of them together i've had to go for a more powerful nas in this case a four core i3 processor nas next up this is not the beta this is a full release this is not the beta version this is the one that's got been signed off by qnap for release so now i think it's fair for us to review it i didn't really want to review the beta because i thought that was a bit unfair also i'm not going to be touching on some of the more enterprise level services so if you come to this video for qufp uh some of the wire guard vpn stuff or maybe some of the fibre channel stuff i am going to be covering those in a future video but just not this one because they go way way way too far into the distance enterprise wise to include in this review i'll touch on them lightly but i'm not really going to go into them in any depth same thing goes for ai facial recognition tools um that can take advantage of google's ai module the tpu that coral m2 i've got an mtpu coral here we do have a video on that but we're not really going to include that we're going to touch on surveillance but not that and finally during bits of this video i will be comparing against qts 4.5.4 the previous version of qnap is going to be running on a ts653d so again i will be looking at that as well as a way of comparison such as in design or how some apps are handled so when we do compare to the old version and we'll be doing a complete comparison soon but that will be running on this 6-bay that uses an intel celeron processor so do bear that in mind and finally i will be doing a video for quts here at the zfs version very very soon so i think that's all that this game is out the way and there is a link to the review which will hopefully be live in the description but for now let's have a good look at qts 5.0 now for those of you that followed the preview um earlier on you'll know that design is one of the areas that i'm not overly won over by by qts5 on the whole i've got to say early doors in this review i am pleased with qts 5.0 i think you if there's one big takeaway i think a lot of people should take in a qts 5.0 upgrade it's about control they've really like if anything they've doubled down on control and notifications and for some people that may be a little bit intimidating i think if we even take a you know even a light look at some of the notification board stuff some of it's the same as it was before but some of the newer ones which use a notification board here on the side of the screen if we zoom in um you can get a lot more information about how to set things up and it isn't just that you can have them there's always been two-step verification and you know the malware move and stuff like that but now there's a lot more breadcrumbs to set those things up and i think a lot of people have had um kind of security hiccups with qnap in the past um some not all of course but some have been caused by people just not knowing how to configure certain security settings and being overly reliant on defaults and i think qts 5.0 has done a lot of stuff there to remedy a lot of their hand-holding stuff but one of the things since the beta that hasn't changed which i'm again i'm going to go in with an early negative here i'm not overly keen on the size of these buttons i've mentioned it before right now i'm zoomed in at 80 i use 80 and 70 on most tabs that i use um and if we flick over to uh qts 4.5.4 right now it's running here at a hundred percent so this is 100 here if we've got the tab on the top we've got the menu we've got the apps obviously if you have more apps it goes to white rows deep but if you flick over to uh qgs5 and you go to 100 zoom there those icons are just too big and they have improved them a little i've got to say since um we uh review previewed the beta but look at the size of this menu here well this is when i've got all of these apps installed now of course i have gone really to town with a number of apps installed here but i've gone particularly deep here on all of those apps and i just think this 100 zoom a lot of people are going to be using this zoom level to read this text but they're not going to want these icons this big so i do hope that again later on in system firmware updates that gets remedied because you've got to have this 80 to make this uh invisible and i still don't quite like how many apps here and it's not even scrollable there so again that's one of an early negatives there but there's not too many criticisms i'm going to have during the course of this video i have been using uh qts 5.0 in beta and now in full release uh for a couple of weeks so again what you know what hiccups i have i will touch on throughout this video but in terms of design i the icons there being too big is something i think that still needs to be revisited um but on the whole i quite like um that they've lightened they definitely you do feel the response times are a lot quicker a lot of that is due to that upgrading background kernel you can definitely see that there and of course you've still got the ability to change the the background stuff there you can change wallpaper and all that kind of stuff but i will say uh when you do change the login screen there that the changes aren't that different compared to what you've seen qts 4.5.4 and indeed there's still this conflict i feel between the design so for example the background there looks very swish very sharp but the minute you go into these panel options the text is quite small and i'm fine reading that at 80 but i can totally see a lot of people having to either zoom manually with a touchpad or start zooming in and of course once you get to 100 where this text is still not even the same size as the top text there the design still could do with a little bit of a revisit there because i think there's a lot of conflict there on that zoom but let's keep that at 90 to keep things fair for everyone um the design itself is still very very clear i think um it's as user friendly as qts 4.5.4 before it um i would say that it's still not as user-friendly as probably one of their biggest competitors synology's dsm and dsm-7 dsm 7 has gone for much more of a less is more they've gone very apple-centric whereas qnap have definitely doubled down on the android and the windowed aesthetics of the android with the icons there and the kind of swish the response time the way things move and drag and stuff like that and of course windows menus and even the control panel feels a lot more windows than it does mac now if we carry on moving forward we can look into some of the background stuff there the design uh once you go into any application not a lot of the applications have changed in terms of their overall aesthetic uh compared with qts 4.5 so if we bring that up on screen let's bring these side by side for a moment let's snap them side by side and again this will make things a little bit tighter there for there on screen we can see if we go into the app center for both of these the app center is going to look pretty similar and you're going to get that throughout this video these things are going to be very similar once you move away from the desktop there they've changed a lot of the background services and the layout of certain options but still nonetheless the individual design on these apps hasn't really been changed that much now moving slightly away from design let's talk about probably one of the key areas for anyone looking at network attached storage and that is security now for those aren't aware qnap has the security councillor and it also has the uh kind of guidance area as well so if we move in and have a look through some of those options on screen we can take a look at some of the other security options that are readily available and of course where is it we've got the security council and then we want the notification center which again is here again a lot of information there to take in i've got a deduct another point there for design it was not easy to immediately find it yes it's alphabetical but there's still a lot of stuff there on screen to have to go through all the time so coming out there if we move out we can see the notification center there we can of course change the directions notification who's getting them and how you want them to be delivered of course as well the nature of those notifications and of course the errors that are notified all the way through the system's use you can see here at one point i had disconnected network connectivity and the system kicked off a multitude of alerts during that period now the same goes for that we have got all of the security settings already set up here i've gone for a basic security policy but again you can adapt these quite quickly and you can even create those customized ones that will change all the settings of the nas um quite tightly there and again we've got um the security check there that we can run a fresh check to see if there's any issues we've got the antivirus check built in there where i've got um scans happening on a regular rotation then we've got the malware checks as well we can run a malware scan and of course run updates on the firewall that we're running where it's going to be blocking or allowing certain protocols and certain apps both inside and outside the nas to conduct their services now the reason i bring all this up all of these things existed uh in a slightly less tweaked form in qts 4.5.4 but they weren't as tied together as neatly these apps existed but definitely some of the the pathways between these applications have been improved quite significantly in how they're addressed and directed to not only from the desktop there or from within other security apps but with from within that noticeable there as it guides you through setting up the device in a less um obtrusive way like when you set up the previous generations of nas there's about 10 different pop-ups um alerting you to security settings in the middle of the screen and it's quite irritating whereas now having it on the notification panel when you log in is a little bit more discreet it does draw the eye it's a lovely design switch and i do quite like that now moving uh from security into users of course in the control panel it's worth highlighting that if we go into for example the users panel nothing's really changed here we can adapt security settings and add users very quickly and adding multiple users of course we create a batch of them really really quickly and we can change all of their permissions their credentials the groups that we're in really really quickly it's all nice and straightforward to create groups of family members business colleagues that sort of thing and all of the options are pretty much where they were before they've added a few tiny ones that are very um um area specific so for example with regards to some of the security sets or when you're using um qnap's my cloud service they've added some extra stuff in the background there as well and again it's all fairly straightforward and easy to add on there and indeed if we look at the firmware sends we can see which version of the firmware we're running there we go right there so coming out of it we can carry on looking a little bit more at storage uh storage is going to be a big area for a lot of people because let's face it qnap although when it comes to kind of the customization and the flexibility and bespoke build quality of qnap now has been quite high it has to be said that um the storage manager although you want all the flexibility in the customization you just want to be able to look at it and know the information at hand now in the case of this device here we've got all the disks listed there inside we're running with four disks inside there we've also got a couple of ssds that are being utilized in our area of cache acceleration uh qts5 has improved cache acceleration there all built in we're going for a read write cache nice and easy and we can get some real-time information from that pretty quickly on top of that we've created the area of storage the volume we've created obviously the storage pool but on top of that you can see there that the cache has been added to that system quite easily we can get real-time drive information which is always lovely to see lots of information about those individual raid groups as well all of this is stuff that we're pretty familiar with it has to be said now moving down we can talk a little bit about snapshots those aren't aware we have got snapshots already loaded into this system nice and easy you can even reclaim space as well some nice flexibility in snapshot storage utilization and in some cases you can reverse some of your earlier decisions in the storage so if you want to add storage um add um snapshots later that you didn't apply early doors and again that's always been a nice feature of qnap they were one of the first to enable snapshots in this quite user-friendly manner and it's quite easy and quite if you know what you're doing with storage all the options are where you'd like them to be but it doesn't er too heavily into the complex here which i quite like now down to the bottom here you can see these three extra options we will talk again about later on but again we've got these tools here that allow us to do multiple things with our storage so for example if we come out we can open up the iscsi manager allows us to create those targets and those lands so we can create a localized appearing storage remotely and as you can see here i've already created one it's really really straightforward to create it does hold your hand a lot and although i'm not going to talk about the fibre channel stuff in this video it's just as straightforward to create a new target if we zoom back out again we can create our targets very easily it does hold your hand all the way through it's quite straightforward you can assign multiple lands to that tar that target if you enjoy and of course you can do the file based on the block base for space uh reclamation if you choose on top of that hybrid mount is where we bolt on uh either remote nas storage something i've done or cloud services so in my case i've attached a cloud service here utilizing the old throwaway google mail account we use for videos alternatively i've also attached the other nas that 653d as available storage and these therefore if we go into the storage uh the file manager even these now have the appearance of localized storage so we've got the google drive there bolted on which we can then use with the appearance if we select whatever folders we want on that drive so we've selected a few folders and all of these will appear there whereas if we go into the other options here we can go into the has come out of it there because it's listed all of those folders we can talk to the other nas and have a look at the folder structure that we decided to view there so only one folder i've selected for music and then of course we've got a usb drive it's all now visible here nice and easily via the file station application and again we can play with how these are listed quite easily and all the options are there it's also worth touching on that microsoft word uh cami and google docs can be utilized to open up word documents um so if we go into my google drive we can have a look there maybe i've got some scripts for some other videos there perhaps we can find one in there go into docs find one for us there and open one up just to give you guys an idea of what i mean so we've got an old unboxing script there so particularly old and then we can say how we want to open it whether we want to use a chrome extension and as chrome extensions you can download and install onto the nas options for google docs for microsoft word and more all of those are built in you can even use the ones that built into your own individual web browser if you choose as you can see they're all listed quite easily and it does let you know what which tools are going to be utilized all the way through and you can even just use the web browsers the ones that you've already got pre-installed now file management extends to more than just file station of course you can utilize lots of files within dedicated applications so if you want for example to take advantage of multimedia there is of course music station there is photo station let's open them all up one by one we have got video station let's bring that up there and of course you have got um q maggie which is the ai powered photo recognition tool now that opens up in its own tab but if we have a look we can see we've got some movies added there we've got the metadata scraped so we can have a look for example there's the matrix we've got the information there not quite as visually appealing i would argue as synology's video station application their ds video app and more i think the design could be a little snazzy there but the playback is still pretty good i'm just going to mute things here so for example if we double click that movie we can view in the web browser it'll also of course be visible via the web browser i am using obs down here so that may affect how the outcome of that is um by the way anyone else totally stoked for the matrix movie this christmas just putting it out there anyway um hopefully this video isn't going to be rewatched in 2022 and that movie was a flop and i sound like a crazy fool but photo station and music station are other applications that can be utilized i've not set up music station in its entirety for a reason i'll show you in just a moment but this is where you can play your music you can stream to individual tools as well so if you've got um an hdmi out or digital uh audio via hdmi audio connected to the nas directly you can use that or streaming devices in your local area network sonoff sound systems both network sound systems they'll all appear they're all there and available photo station of course kind of the more pro photo application we look at the gallery there this allows us to get more metadata about the photos that are taken and of course with all of that metadata you also get with it a lot of the ability to filter and categorize and create bespoke albums this is from back in berlin last i believe two years ago and again lots of information there we've got some of the geolocational data as well all built in information about the cameras and the lens as well and again you can do lots of stuff you can use facial recognition from q maggie that i'm going to talk about in a moment as well as create a customized slideshow share these files quite easily on a multitude of services or just use a copy link as well with lots of abilities of how you want it shared do you want a password uh how long you want it to be valid for that sort of thing all of those options are built in but of course it isn't just looking at it in the gallery mode you can do the management mode it's got a timeline it lacks the map feature that i quite like i don't know where the map why the map features been removed but still nonetheless it is still good to be able to scroll your photos and again sort through them and create shared folders that you as a professional photographer that maybe are doing wedding photo shoots or just general shoots could then share with your customers and then control the sharing of those so for example you can create um a batch of photos that you want to share there and then from the ones i've just selected you can then choose what you want to do with those so you can choose do i want to share those file files do i want to enter them into their own album do i want to download them do you want to play those as a shy slideshow there's lots of things we can do within this app but of course the premium photo app is always going to be q maggie now q maggie's got that gallery mode as mentioned there's all of the photos on the nas but what we really want to do if we go to view mode there we can sort of change the grid we can kind of put it into a size based mode there we can look at the one by one if we choose or we can do a timeline mode as well depending on however it is that we want to look at it but the real cool mode is of course the albums using ai powered photo recognition we can go ahead and get faces recognized there so for example we can go for this photo of me here and then from there we can go ahead and name this person which in my case if we go back we can name them there give it my name boom i'm in the database and then if there's me there what i can do is select this select me because i've been added to the database and boom it's now pulling all these pictures of me where i look slightly different sunglasses hats beards that sort of thing and you can do that with all those people but the cool thing is these tags are then carried over to that photo station application there so again having those tags split across the two things is always going to be useful there to be able to synchronize the photo recognition tools at the same time as the ai recognition here but those tags that you apply there it's not the end of the road because once you go into the albums mode you can go into things mode and this is where the ai recognition can notice things in phone so for example this has got 84 photos of animals and there you go they've all been tagged now unfortunately you can't tag uh individual animals that i think is a little bit outside the scope but again you can apply these tags if you choose to these which can then be picked up here on photo station in a number of ways and again the breakdown of that arrow recognition is impressive because it's not only that it recognizes things typically it actually goes into a little bit more detail such as individual food stuffs or noticing different kinds such as waffles there or going for different cuisines when it's recognized japanese cuisine there now it's not always perfect because sometimes it is working with an ai framework that is a cat where half of it's going for a box at christmas it's listed as a reptile it definitely isn't same with rainbow so the ai recognition isn't perfect but qnap much like most ai support services are using google's own ai algorithm and supplied ai services so you're not going to get much better than this on google either these are going to be recognized that same way so coming out of qmaggie there and all of those services in photo recognition let's talk a little bit about backups and synchronization because a lot of you are going to be concerned about where your data lives and the security of your data as already mentioned when we went into the storage manager that when it comes to your data in a raid configuration there's lots of different raid configs you can create on this and they're very easy to make unfortunately i've already set up the raid on this box but from within that storage area we can then if we choose manage this system area in terms of the storage pool with scrubbing and removing or adding drives if we choose running maintenance checks or even if we go into individual drives running um security uh and um not security um um the health checks on drive so for example we can check out the disk health on a number of drives and of course there's iowa health management built in as well so if you do have the uh rescue recovery service built to the seagate drive it will appear there and again you just have to register that early doors on the system that you have it and then after that the system tracks that for you again lots of different features built in both from qnap themselves in smart tests and more but of course there is the um the health analyzer tool as well i am going to have a whole dedicated video on this tool or i was using some of the beta software we're not really going to touch on it too much in this video if we look at drive analyzer let's find it there where's d8 i'm not sure if it's going to be listed i believe it may still be in beta but the drive analyzer tool is definitely a kind of a an extra layer of drive health security check moving forward but i believe right now the latest beta has ended on that as you may have seen once we looked at uh some of the alerts earlier that highlighted my license had expired but the da analyzer is something that qnap themselves do talk about a lot and it is something that i will be covering very very soon but outside of raid what you really want to know about of course is synchronization and backups and of course one of the earliest and most um useful tools from qnap on this is hybrid backup sync 3. now hybrid backup sync 3 allows you to create quite a detailed backup routine of uh and synchronization i might add of all of your data on the nas and on other services um i will of course be talking about qsync as well because qsync is a tool that you will install on your desktop and mobile devices which allows you to synchronize the data in individual folders on your now so in my case i can open up qsync here where it's cusing open it up and again i said i won't talk too much about desktop tools but i'll get back to hdbs3 in a second but it's worth talking about qsync first because this is the tool that you're going to be utilizing if on your nas for example you want to make sure you have a folder that is constantly synchronized with your now so in my case i've got two nazis they're synchronized so this is on my windows machine here and this allows me to synchronize folders on my nas locally with my computer and if any changes happen in these folders these will be reflected on the nas and vice versa and it allows me to interact with the nas remotely and via the internet if i set it up um with myqnapcloud and go through all files and folders on my nas but using my localized tools you can also use of course iscsi and of course you can use mapped network drives all of those options are available but again having this tool for both your mobile devices and your desktop devices for mac linux and of course windows allows you to synchronize important areas so for example this synchronization here is a lot of my temp data on this laptop when i do my editing so this means if my laptop breaks in the background i have a synchronized folder that's using um non-linear edited copies in the background synchronized with my nas at all times so these are tiny files incredibly important which are being backed up to the nas and then i only keep 147 gig space on the pc backed up to the nas for my editing which then gets refreshed and recycled over time and then the nas of course backs up those folders on the nas to other locations on hbs that i'm going to show you in a moment qsync is a very overlooked tool in my opinion and i have done dedicated videos on this which allow you to add multiple devices all the time to either backup their contents or select content or synchronize with the um the nas certain folders so vice versa folders can be accessed now the difference between that and hbs3 is hybrid backup sync 3 allows you to add a huge number of supported services from nasda nas backups nas to cloud backups um nasd usb backups a real-time remote replication apple time machine so many different backup methods and all of these backup methods have scheduled um options they have a version control they have time managed backups file size control i've got three backup operations here that are running daily here that are running one to another nas one to the cloud and one to usb drive all of them set up exceedingly quickly indeed just to give you some idea here's how quickly you can set up these tools the backup structures if we create a new backup job so we open up the tool and again they do have integrity checks i forgot to mention on that so first thing we want to do is select a folder on our nas that we want to back up so in my case why don't i choose to back up my container data so there we go and again if you're gonna map an external volume that's been mapped to your drive you can do that if you choose so again an external volume we can go for and that's the usb drive i'm not going to be doing that if we go for just the container data then select next and from here we can say where we want to send the backup so for example do we want to send it to this same nas or maybe a usb port do we want to send it to another nas do we want to use all of these cloud services which we can then just select and then it will open up ask us to log into that cloud service provider remotely and then from there you can set up that backup but in my case let's go for that local usb now as just to show you from here it's now going to ask us to select the destination on the local nas so in my case i would use the usb i would then choose a new backup i would select a new folder perhaps and call it backup two add the folder on the new volume add the folder and boom we've got new backup folder too select okay and there we go we've got our location we're backing up from and where to we've got that fine we can name the job we can select individual files and folders select next from here we can say do we want to schedule it do we want to do it as a one-off we can say do we want the versioning control enabled we can say do we want regular integrity checks of that data it's all built up in there do we want to take advantage of deduplication the ability to if you've got backups from multiple locations all going into the same area that it only keeps one copy of the file but keeps track of everyone who's got a copy of it such as operating system files you can enable that here backup policies encryption you can change so many things about what to do if a job fails or how big you want certain files to be you can even say how you want it to adapt to the network during network traffic or if there are network interference finally you can say um confirm everything you've done so far and click create to create that job and again if we go all the way back and cancel this job what we can do instead is go ahead and show you how to do a cloud backup so again we can do a cloud backup job like i've created there with google so again we'll go for the container folder select next and we'll select a backup option so in my case i'm going to go with google drive it will say do you want to use the one that you've already added you know what because i want to show you guys fresh you can go ahead and select for example onedrive a onedrive pop-up will appear it'll ask you to sign into your onedrive account and once you've done that all the other steps you've just seen are all the same again if you want to do a synchronization job which is two folders that are the same and synchronize on two nases which is what i've done here it's exactly the same principle so you can do a two-way sync so the data remains the same a one-way sync so the data is moved or an active sync job which is constant so for example a two-way sync job you would say where do you want destination it's going to be on a remote nas but again you can synchronize with those blob cloud storages again hbs3 is still for my money one of the best designed in terms of aesthetic and usability backup tools on the market i know in recent months it's been under fire for a lot of security problems um linked to people on the update in their software and i would dare i say qnap dropping the ball a few times as well but i'm still behind it as a tool and i think it's one of the best ones out there for synchronization there are vm related tools and we'll move on to the subject of vms now i think in terms of virtualization uh we've got several uh kind of virtual instant tools available one of them i've already kind of talked about which was container station they'll talk about there we have got a virtualization station as well and finally you've got ubuntu linux station as well ubuntu linux station i'll touch on briefly allows you within two clicks to install a linux vm that you can access remotely very very easily on your nas bear in mind that the ubuntu linux station is a standalone vm and it can because it runs as a container it will use up a lot of resources inside but it's still incredibly useful it's completely free and if you want to experiment with linux it's great way to start coming out of linux station we've then got container station now container station for those aren't aware if going back to virtualization station a vm is a virtual equivalent of a computer that allows you to run it to be accessed remotely by the network or the internet container station is kind of a virtual app without the os it allows you to run kind of sandbox applications without the dependency of an operating system or a hypervisor container station you've got the app center here so you can choose to head there and install lots of apps that are being made available in the whole app center so if we go to create you can find absolutely loads of applications ready and available to install and there are thousands as well or just install your own manual ones again you can import ones from the store export existing ones that you've all created and there's lots of configuration if you love containers it's a great tool i've already running odo there as a container and again we can go into the command line if we choose and do what we want to do with it to play with it there's lots of configuration options ready and available but i know most people are concerned with virtualization of the kind of standard hypervisor client variety i've got three windows 11 vms i've already done a dedicated video on this very nas not a short while ago showing windows 11 vms running on here virtualization station has got a huge number of configuration tools so if we go into one of these vms i've not turned it on yet actually if we uh turn on one of these vms down here and we will deactivate it later in the video uh just because it otherwise it will take up a lot of resources let's run that vm there underneath and while we do that i'm just going to show you the configuration options on this other vm here so again you can configure a lot of things everything from network tools there in the background hard drive adding um adding more storage even usb devices that you want to appear within the vm and the windows vm and more pcie tools graphics cards and more you can also change a lot of the preset configurations really really easily in the vm there's a lot of playground stuff here for you to play with and a lot of stuff that you can add manually to the vm to make your virtual machine have a lot of the feeling of a localized configuration let's open that up in a separate tab um you've also got the option to download certain vms we've got uh blocking happening in the background unfortunately this is something that's going to happen due to uh my recording environment here so unfortunately i'm not able to show you the vm marketplace but i'm a word for it there is a huge list of vm tools there and again you can even go ahead and download a windows vm but again my network blocking right now is going to prevent that for the course of this video but you can download directly different windows 7 8 9 and 10 and i'm sure they'll add 11 soon to download there you go straight away they have actually already added um an image for windows 11 there to download and try out but again i think my network busyness is going to make showing off some of these features a little trickier but i have done a full dedicated video there on windows 11 using qgs5 on virtualization station 3 already on the channel i think that came out a couple of weeks ago in fact now if you are a vm user you are going to be thinking about your data in a number of ways and this kind of links in a little bit to the conversation regarding virtual machines tools such as the hyper protector which allows you to back up the data from those uh vms and some cloud related ones such as taking advantage of vmware and hyper-v and have them all backed up to the nas some of which can be portaled over to the virtualization station application so if i log into the app here utilizing my nas credentials it'll allow you to go through some of the options to either back up some of those services in hyper-v and vmware some of which can then be imported and exported relative to which one you want to do over to virtualization station also on top of that while you've got the vm tools there you've of course got box safe box safe which is utilized in conjunction with google's g suite or taking advantage of um office 365 you can log in let's go for it there sorry slightly far away from my keyboard and this allows you to attach your domain if you're utilizing workspace or 365 and from there keep a localized backup of all of your email accounts the accounts you created a lot of the docs and have a synchronized resource between your remote cloud services and all of those tools that you use with the nas in the event if you have a drop down in internet connectivity you can connect all of your services to the nas which will then synchronize with the cloud data in the background later ultimately ensuring that in the event of internet disconnection your localized business users your staff your clients and more have got access to all of this data on your um business class uh platform that saas software as a service platform without internet connectivity and synchronized there later on and utilized an accessible in a native way which is always useful now we've talked a lot about these services i did actually overlook when i was talking about multimedia earlier on the hdmi output if you have a nas that takes advantage of an hdmi out then of course you can portal into your nas and deal with some applications there now of course we're recording this on the web browser but it's worth highlighting that you can log in to the hdmi out on your nas via the web browser and from there it will allow you to not only see what's going on the hdmi out we had to disable linux station to do it hence the cut in the video but it allows you to install lots more applications both in first and third party and access your nas locally with a keyboard video mouse or kvm setup with applications available for communication such as skype multimedia apps such as hd player music station first station and video station spotify to access your music via the nas and record some of them in places and of course access your surveillance tools as well with the qvr program this is how it looks we've portaled in via the localized access point there via the web browser but of course you can access this via the hdmi out and of course you can set default applications install other applications and of course there are other third-party applications available from places like qnap club to install multimedia apps dv dtv services and more coming out of all of those we can carry on and talk about surveillance surveillance a big big big part of the synology platform the qnap platform there and of course if we go into it we can have a little look at qvr pro which again we can log into via the web browser on top of that there are other added services as well not all of which i have installed but are worth touching on again lots of applications we're playing with this if we go into the surveillance tab we can see the options available we've got q usb cam which we can actually open up which allows you to attach a usb camera to your nas and from there that usb camera can then be used for um live access local to the navs we've even attached a camera here which we can if we choose activate live mode and if i move over to the camera you can attach usb cameras to the nas if you choose but of course the real beauty is when you're going to be utilizing remote cameras now remote cameras are known as ip cameras you can attach cameras easily and you know change the rules and stuff like that on the nas but you can't access the cameras via the web browser it's one of the things i've been less keen on uh when it comes to surveillance on a qnap i think the eight camera licenses you get with qvr pro is still awesome and there are loads of other added services as well for qbr go to qb uh qbr guard sorry qvr smart search to browse through things quickly qvr center where you can uh kind of create a multi-platform um synchronized surveillance tool and of course you've got ai supported services in qbr face tiger face link face insight and there are others coming too and indeed qvr do door for io related um hardware that utilizes surveillance that can all be integrated in again i've got dedicated videos on qvr face and one coming up soon that takes advantage of that mtu that we mentioned earlier that coral google ai support thing to really lower resource consumption there but if we come out in order to see the cameras in all their glory you have to go into qvr's client application now again i said i wouldn't go on it too into too much detail but as we log into qvr pro here we this is the user interface for that app to install on the windows platform and again some of my cameras right now i am utilizing on other nazis so even though they're on the network we're not able to access them because they're being used by another nas at this time but we can do is drag some of these a couple of other cameras in and we can see there the usb camera from earlier i'll wave at it there and then above me i've got another camera there at the top and again lots of stuff we can do with this we can create a picture in picture to zoom in what i'm typing there we can create another picture in picture and my little list of notes as well as my phone and some of the other junk that i'm using there during this video and others and again all of that laid round there that we can utilize it's a pan tilt zoom camera which unfortunately the pan tilt zoom camera number one is not accessible at this time but again we can set patrol patterns recording patterns create e-maps the whole works all of it can be accessed here and again all of these have got the same features that we can go in and create zoomed areas and indeed snapshots if we choose which are saved locally as well as all of the control and more as well as switching between streams lowering the picture quality event notifications with all of the event uh handling being done on the side of the app here so we can create new event rules new camera settings and more all from within this window along with intelligent motion detection which will allow us to track objects with smarter cameras and using a lot of those ai services really bring it all together for a real business class surveillance experience however it's worth highlighting as much as i like qts and definitely qts5 has improved things definitely in terms of control and they have looked at making security settings a little bit more palatable and understandable one area of qnap which i've always had slightly mixed feelings about is to do with licensing for those aren't aware um qnap a lot of its services you get free licenses early doors there's that drive analyzer one i touched on earlier but the the applications a lot of them and particularly some of the enterprise ones you either get just a couple of licenses or you get no licenses and you have to download individual licenses at the license center from qnap now it makes sense in some regards that sometimes you're going to be using things for business class services and to make sure these services are maintained they should be paid for but sometimes they're a little tighter on the licenses than i think they should be so for example for qvr pro for nas you get eight camera licenses included for free but then they cost quite a lot per camera license and others for example qvr elite which is the same as qpr pro but it utilizes less system resources and runs on less nas systems as they phase out surveillance station these only run on subscription services you can't get a permanent license they only lure last for a certain period of time same goes to some of the other services like q search where you have to get a license although things are changing with some q search and q file licenses being handed out for some users uh as incentives and hybrid mount you have two licenses by default but again you can add more but they're subscription based and you already chances are using a subscription service um on those cloud services to start with and some of these such as the ai supported services you either get no licenses at all or beta licenses so again although this is more about qnap stance on licenses more than the applications themselves i would still like to see the things change a little bit more on that moving forward and again i am using obs this is a reminder so there may have been the odd conflict there during some of those switches that's come out of the surveillance platform let's cancel it out there stop to close it yes we do and i think for now we can kind of wrap things up on our review and how things compare on qts for 5.0 and how they compare against qgs 4.5.4 because there's a lot to talk about here and we've covered quite a lot of things in today's video things that i love i definitely like the new notice board it does keep things nice and straightforward it definitely makes i think the security setup and knowing what you're doing a lot easier definitely more than the pop-ups that appear when you start up your qnap nas on qgs 4.5.4 when we look at it there things like when you go into it here i think a lot of the notifications here they're a lot more like kind of hidden they're not really brought to your attention and indeed i think a lot of the resource handling of qts 5.0 is a lot sharper things definitely feel a lot more responsive i haven't touched on some areas as i mentioned in my disclaimer at the beginning the support of say wire guard and more vpn services and vpn abilities as well to keep things particularly safe with the nas acting as a kind of conduit for the rest of the devices in your home environment i do like a lot more of these services being added in qvpn but of course a lot of these once again require additional payments from individual vpn providers i think obviously a lot of the key applications in qtes 5.0 have always existed such as q maggie still one of my favorite applications for ai recognition hybrid mount something that again again we've got that unclean file system there because i've attached to usb drives that need to change i like those notifications i like how they pop up and alert me in a more subtle and less aggressive way in this new version of qts i like that hybrid mount can use any cloud service unlike say for example um synology's hybrid share which only utilizes their own cloud platform and whereas their c2 qnap has still kept things very very open and again it's always that fine balance with qnap trying to find the difference between customization and control security and freedom on their platform something i still think to this day that having difficulty keeping a pin on but it is an ever wavering point now we talked about uh security of course and again you've got things like mcafee built in again needs a license and if you want to use it for business services you've got q filing you've got q search those two applications are staying on top of the files on your system on a business class level as well as searching intelligently throughout the whole system in a far more familiar fashion to those that utilize standard google services where we can look up things within the nas in a much faster manner and in a much more familiar and customizable fashion which is always good to see we will be revisiting those um ai supported services but take my word for it you do have to pay a pretty penny on other platforms to have this and the ability to have this without a gpu is still worth talking about albeit if there is a buffer of licensing in the way teamviewer is something we're going to talk about in another video that allows you to bolt on the nas to your qnap um to bolt on the qnap nas to your existing team viewer list of services so if you have a bunch of pcs and client applications and hardware on your teamviewer list you can add the qnap nas so you can have that one portal access which is always cool to see so we've got a whole dedicated video on teamviewer there and aside from i would argue some questionable decisions in terms of uh the design aesthetic where i think there is definitely still major conflict there in my eyes between for example the font sizes and the design of the ui which feels too gradual rather than them releasing the entire design upgrade as its own software upgrade rather than calling this whole thing qts 5.0 i think areas of the aesthetic could still be revisited but i can't fault them on the applications i can't fault them on how they're presenting security options better than they have previously are they perfect no are they where they need to be no i do think the security updates i think um although they are done in a great more cheerful and more friendly and user-friendly fashion there's still not enough things being done by default and i think as much as they want to be customizable and they want to be as adaptable and bespoke to all users i think they do need something a little bit more like when you go into the security councilor and there is just a pull down for basic security settings where these are a little bit more understandable so users understand what they're doing a little bit more all the information's there and all the controls are there but i think it still might be a little bit harder for those not willing to put in a little bit more time and climb the learning curve but this has been my review of qts 5.0 you guys know i don't really like doing scores out of five or ten or percentages i will say qts5 is better than qts 4.5.4 i think as long as they're prepared to work on the design aesthetic where the text like it does in the old version here feels like it goes the design aesthetic seemingly you know for me matches a great deal better than it does in the new version and i will stop ragging on that if they can just address this i think qts 5.0 is the best version of their system software they've done to date it's the cleanest it's the most responsive it just needs to address some of these designs um the actual aesthetic design conflicts thank you so much for watching if you've enjoyed this exceptionally long video do let me know in the description again in the comments i apologize to the link but there was so much to cover today and i've not even touched on everything if you've enjoyed the video click like click subscribe to learn more i will be addressing all of those things from quts versions to ai q ufp vpn and fibre channel stuff very very soon and again i have got a full comparison side-by-side on these two applications coming very very soon stay tuned for that but i will see you next time

Channel: NASCompares

Views: 8,433

Keywords: QNAP 2021, QNAP 2022, QNAP NAS, QNAP NAS 2020, QNAP NAS 2021, QNAP NAS Drive, QNAP NAS Drive Software, QNAP NAS Safe, QNAP NAS Security, QNAP NAS Update, QNAP QTS, QNAP QTS 5.0, QNAP Security, QTS 5, QTS 5 vs DSM 7, QTS 5.0, QTS vs DSM, QNAP Software Test, QNAP Software Guide, QNAP NAS Test, QNAP QTS 5, QNAP QTS 5 Download, QNAP Software review, QNAP QTS Review, QNAP QTS 5 REVIEW, QNAP QTS 5.0 Review, QNAP NAS Review, QNAP QTS 5 Software Review, QTS 5 Review

Id: Z55sIhIKHWo

Length: 57min 48sec (3468 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 07 2021