QNAP TS-364 NAS Review - Too Niche?

hello and welcome back and before we start today's reviews we're going to give you guys a heads up about a giveaway i'm doing at the end of the year this year 2021 at the end of this year i'm going to be giving away some of the items that i've reviewed here on the channel in the last year or two and if you want to enter or get your hands on some of this stuff then what i recommend you do is watch this video and look out for the mention of a christmas movie i've done this on a few other videos at the end of the year i'm going to start giving some of the bits and bobs out but in order to enter see if you watch this video spot the christmas movie in question and then put it down there in the comments go down there into the comments and just put down the name of the movie that is it and then towards the end of the year we'll do a random draw and hand out some of those goodies but as mentioned whether you're watching this on the video put it in the comments or if you're watching this on one of the social platforms over and that's comparison facebook twitter or whatever just put it in the comments of that video wherever it's linked to anywhere else won't count but otherwise thank you so much for watching hope you stay tuned for that giveaway again this thing is going to be entered and we're going to mention it later in the video the tbs464 but for now let's crack on with the review and find out a little bit more about this ts364 [Music] and there we have it the second entry into the qnap 64 series of devices it is a new proshumer kind of smb small medium business range of desktop devices a 64 series again we've already talked about one unit prior to this uh the very first release for that series was this the tbs 464 and nvme equipped intel celeron system and this one is incredibly niche and unsurprisingly this range continues with its niche topic we're not really seeing many of the mainline twos and fours and six bay devices yet i think they're going to eat into 2022 realistically but this is the second device here this is a three bay nas now i know a number of you immediately go what now three bays that's absolutely right three ways is a strange number indeed isn't it for years and years and years we've got used to the idea of having these kind of defined standalone storage systems in das or nas with rate capabilities to protect our data and improve performance and they've always gone the same way one bay two bay four bay six bay eight bay but suddenly in the last few years qnap kind of looked at that and went and pushed a three-bay into the middle this is i believe the third iteration of their three-base series um this rebate series that have come before them always have seemingly arrived close but no cigar in a number of ways they've either prioritized the external connectivity and then given internal you know hardware some low end arms or they've given some great internal capabilities and fairly rubbish external capabilities but in this this new iteration they've kind of really balanced things out worked out all the gremlins that sort of thing and figured out where they should really sit there in the middle and with this the ts364 which is a hard drive and ssd equipped system um this three bay which honestly is more of a five bay once we crack down into it is a very interesting nas for those of you to look at two bays and go well in a raid one i'm going to lose all my storage where's the future proofing or you've looked at four bays and bigger and gone i don't need that much this one sits beautifully in the middle while still giving you a good level of internal hardware is it perfect no the design choices are a little bit shonky for me and in some ways it's really boosted things over its predecessors but there's a couple of really weird design choices throughout the way in terms of its um hardware architecture that i still query a little bit now in terms of price point at the time i'm making this video i can't really find a solid online price i know i could reach out to qnap and get the rrp but the problem with rrps or recommended retail prices it's never really true they're always kind of are they putting the price then it's never that high realistically so looking around the different places that have had uh listing stocks for this the price tag in pounds at least sits at around three to three hundred and fifty nicker given that two bays knock around for about two to fifty and four base knock around for about five five fifty that 350 maybe even an edge in closer to 400 is probably the most realistic price point there but no doubt when you're watching this now the price point uh a few weeks down the line is gonna be a lot more solid so i'm gonna stick an est estimated or tbc somewhere in the description there but this freebie now is arriving in quite similar kind of retail packaging to what you've seen before let's have a look inside um i should highlight i'm not going to talk a great deal or show off much of the software capabilities i've done a huge review of the software for this and other qnap devices called in the qts5 kind of supported bracket of devices i've also got a nine part guide series that should go live any day now um for the qnap range of devices so if you want to learn more about the software although i will talk about it at points throughout this video i strongly recommend watching my qts5 review which should be linked in the description as well as stay tuned for a lot of those guides on how to make the most of your qna nails but inside we've got our box of accessories this is the unboxing portion of the video um inside we have our uk mainly we have an external power brick there so this external fabric it's a 65 watt psu and again it requires a kettle plug so even though the uk one's in there it's not going to be tough to replace that also inside we've got our quick start installation guide and again mildly useful again there's plenty of assets online i know a lot of people like to have a paper manual but i never you know i i don't use them unless they're particularly extensive and this one just seems a bit box ticky for my liking um also information on the warranty this system arrives with two years of warranty a slight lower than i would have liked to have seen if i'm honest given that the 53 d series that came out a year and a half ago that a three year warranty i'm kind of surprised that this is rolling off the debt with just two years warranty off the bat and also there's information on extending that warranty uh you can get it up to five years there so again i'm not sure i feel about that i think it's all right it's pretty good but still two years is a great number it's just a shame they couldn't settle on three like last year we've got a single lamb cable there this is a cat5e cable although i will say this is a 2.5 gbe equipped box so again this cable is more than sufficient for that we've also got um adhesive heat sinks here for the m2 ssd slots inside that we're going to talk about in a little bit more detail later on as well as um kind of screw holders there pin holders they're at the bottom rather than traditional screwdriver screws again you're not really going to need much of a screwdriver for this something i'm going to show you later on but that's really it the accessories inside this box let's get that out of there i always make a point of highlight with a lot of particularly server devices be they small or big i will definitely judge a device quite strongly on how it is shipped because these are devices that although they don't have a lot of moving parts are quite susceptible to shock damage motion damage in transit and given that most of these things are developed in the east and rolled out from there that's a lot of transit there and i'm pleased to say that in the case of qnap they're still massively protecting these things with that hard phone all the way around i thought i could punch this and it could be absolutely fine there let's remove our phone again big old thick bits of phone let's have a little look at the device itself again it's quite an unusual shape this isn't the first time i've talked about the 3b now series here on the channel um but with this one a lot of the kind of range of it has gone into length it's a real you know very boxy there on the front a complete square there on the front of the chassis when you look of a look at a lot of four bays and stuff like that or even these two bays like this one here this device is the same height as those but it's the depth of these nazis that really show off the difference once again looking at this standard tube this is an asus store 2-bay here we can see the height difference there with this 3-bay device having to factor in a lot more channel trajectory of a lot of that cooling and the way that the hard drive sits inside something we're going to go into a little bit more detail on later on but if we go back to the chassis here we can have a little look at the front now the front of this device the first thing that will hit you is no trace there is no hot swapping enabled on this device the whole system has got an internal installation you can't hot swap those drives even if you delicately try to take it apart it's just not going to work for you there now cooling on this system there's no active calling on the side then by active no passive cooling on the sides the base has a little bit of ventilation there as you can see but the majority of the ventilation comes from a fan there on the rear of the device and quite subtly we have airflow here all the way along the side panel but we've also got a vent here at the base it's not an enormous amount of cooling i'll grant you but still it's nice to have that ventilation you can once again see that this is a device that is very much based on uh horizontal airflow with nothing escaping out the sides again we've talked about this before when brands have a tendency to sometimes not put any vents on the side and a lot of the time some people do worry that that can lead to increased temperatures of the kind of media inside but not when it's designed to come up with that funnel based cooling there something that's quite present on this because they're trying to compact in three storage bays of hard drive media and two nvme ssd storage bays there now we've got leds here on the front for each of those individual storage media bays inside on top of that you've got connected leds there that can be dimmed or increased in brightness all the way through for things like system status network status activity on all the drive media power button there on the front and we've also got a usb one touch copy button there on the base now for those aren't aware one touch copy buttons for me are a thing i think all nazis should have they've been around since nazi's first in this form at least arrived on the seed seen more than a decade ago and the simple idea that i can have a usb drive that i carry for work or for studies or for personal use that periodically i just connect to my nas by a simple connection and then while i go off and make a cup of tea because i'm british and that's what we do when i go over there and do something else i can just physically click that button and then it will start the backup whether that's the backup of my usb to the nas or the nas backing up to the usb now again i could have done that with the software i could have done it on my phone and actioned it i could have done it with the software to automatically trigger that usb backup the minute i connected the usb drive those are all things i could have done but for me the idea that i can physically action it is the same as not relying on an auto save on a game it's the same as not relying on automatic background um saving when i'm editing videos like this i need to have a manual option as well for that piece of mind now that usb backup there it's got diff backups there so any changes are backed up you can have individual photos or entire storage area backups it can be omnidirectional on top of that you've also got time managed as well and versioning built in so you can have different storage images of all of that data that you've backed up so you can revert to an older one again this can work in either direction as well and the usb doesn't have to be disconnected either at all times so you can have a localized backup for the most core important files on the nas encrypted if you choose as well to just click whenever you want to back up or let it happen automatically internally also remember that you can set it up that when the usb backup is completed it will safely remove it internally so you don't have to log in and safely remove the usb there it's a small small feature but it's something i don't understand why it's not on all nazis it's too useful and even at the enterprise level it might be useful one or two times to back up regular core files to another directory but that's enough about something as rudimentary as that now if we move away from the front and all that ventilation the chassis is plastic all the way around i know a number of you wondering when you've stopped hitting this thing um on the base as mentioned we've got those rubberized feet all the way along the bottom and again a little bit of ventilation there under some of the storage bays now if we have a look at the rear of this device we can see a little bit of stuff there we've got that active fan and again it's rpm rotations per minute can be adjusted at any time from within the software uh on top of that we have got a couple more usb ports what's really interesting and also at the same time a little disappointing is those usb ports there the usb 3.2 gen 2 which is bang on get in 10 gigabit connectivity there for our storage media so way way faster than the standard usb 3.2 gen1 there on the front but why are they on the back they're really useful and again usb on qnap nazis supports a a lot of different features and services from um network dongles to 5gbe upgrades to add more network port to 2.5 or 5gb net to the device webcams peripheral devices keyboard mice all kinds of stuff can be connected but what i want these or at least one of these on the front because when i'm backing up i want the backup to be lovely and quick i'm surprised that the most useful usb port is on the back not on the front given they've got that touch copy button it's a small thing and again very very niche i kind of wish that was there on the front there for sheer blind convenience to me now we have a 2.5 gb e port which i personally love i love that qnap is putting 2.5 gb on pretty much all of their systems at the same price point as one gbe and no one else apart from asus store of course is really doing that which is great to see there is only one port which is a bit of a bummer and a lot of you will remember the ts332x which is a 10gbe 3bay nas which had a fairly shoddy cpu inside um but still only having one port bit of obama but at least it's 2.5 gb e there um there's an hdmi port again qnap has still got hd station so you can run a parallel uh completely different graphical user interface with a keyboard mouse or ir remote control or the mobile phone remote cue remote as well as your smart tv an hdmi monitor whatever you want and therefore use it for surveillance a virtual machine to turn it into a localized pc with qvm then this high definition media enjoyment there's music there's uh even third party apps like skype and spotify and stuff like that even youtube i believe as well as well as a bunch of homebrew applications on the qnap club community that i recommend you checking out there's a lot of stuff you can do with this with the hdmi port but again the usb ports just stick one at the front to stick that fast one at the front i'm not wasting a usb 3.2 gen 2 on a sodding keyboard i'm not mad but apart from that it's still a very very effective device that i will say um if this is anything like um the three base i've tested previously and i will be doing a noise test on this by the way but if this is anything like the three base i've tested before and gone by the spec sheets themselves the three bay is actually a lot noisier than i think it would be it's not like clang bang or you know really irritating noises but it does definitely make a little bit of noise there more than a traditional two or even a four bay and a lot of that is to do with that elongated architecture and the way the trays are laid out internally that i'm going to show you in just a moment now if we open this up so we've got three screws here on the rear and again even though you they are flat headed there on the top they are quite they are thumb screw based so we can rotate them just with our hands there and then we can rotate remove all three screw screws and have a good look at those storage media bays inside um now the connectivity on this is fairly standard i can understand that price point being a little bit sweeter there in the middle um it lacks a lot of the more aggressive stuff for the 53 d series so again no pcie upgrades only a single lan port there not a 4k hdmi out but still i think it's a good level of access and connectivity while still leveraging a lot of internal hardware advantages as well so if i remove that side panel there someone there having a good old drill we remove that put that there on the table you can see the rest of that chassis internally plastic all the way through and again lots of this is to hold that framework of the storage media in place inside we pop that there just on the side and we can have a little look at the inside of this nas so again we've got our three hard drive storage bays there as you can see there on screen and again all of them are removable click and load tray so again instead of using a screwdriver here what we can do is use these little pins here on the side which then pincer the hard drive inside it's a little bit flimsy you've got to say i'm not a huge fan of the design of it there i think it doesn't feel as sturdy as a lot of the 3.5 inch trays i've looked at before again this isn't meant to be uh an enterprise level nas so i'm not going to be too hard on the trays and again we've far surpassed the point in the last five six seven years where these are built in any way where heat or vibration is going to effect and these are still very rugged drives you know for their build but still it just feels a little plasticky there with that plastic there holding that in place that's not going to be there when you've got the hard drive installed there at the top and when we do a lot of our software testing on this we've got some plex testing and a vm test coming up it's going to be interesting to see that you know if any of the noisy little vibration there when it's in operation is going to be coming from those trays there if i remove all three of those trays very very quickly we cannot see those two bays right there those are our nvme ssd bays there now in terms of storage architecture on this system let's kind of delve into that a little bit there firstly those three bays of hard drive storage and the same hard drive they can of course be used for ssds although how you're putting an ssd in that i don't know um these um hard drive bays are saturn architecture they support up to the latest 20 tv drives from the lights of wd and uh seagate there there's no drive locking something that um synology of kind of getting a bit flat for recently um so again whether you're going to be utilizing you know your wd reds or your seagate iron wolves inside this still a tremendous amount of storage capability so with three drives in there even in a raid 5 environment you're looking at 40 terabytes of storage there which is great in a storage system like this and again that's still with an extra drive to fall back on now the nvme base inside there allow you to install nvme ssds much much much faster than traditional hard drives and those ssds can be utilized for caching where you can leverage their performance to improve the access time to data that would traditionally be on the slower but larger capacity hard drives and that's read and write caching depending on how you want to proceed you can also utilize those ssd base as just standard storage pools so a lovely fast area of storage there that you can use for your most important data but do bear in mind remember only 2.5 gbe there on the rear um you can utilize it with a system known as q-tier which is when instead of like caching when copies of your data is moved on to the ssd for faster access or during write operations when data is written to the ssds first for faster uploads and then moved over to the hard drives um is when the system analyzes the most frequently accessed data be it big or small and then moves the most commonly requested and most important data over to the ssd and then moves less used data over onto the hard drives and then slowly swaps data out over time depending on the storage access trends of your active users so again tutor incredibly useful still annoying that it's not available on the qts quts platform but it is available on qts there on top of that you can utilize the m2 nvme slots there inside to be utilized with this the coral the tpu card that google have been talking about quite a lot and this is a small module that massively improves ai assisted operations so for those who aren't aware we are going to get around to the video on this which has been quite busy this is the coral tpu you can put one or two of these two seams wildly overkill into one or both of those nvme slots and this will improve ai recognition in things like uh q maggie for photo recognition it can also be utilized with a lot of the deep video analysis stuff on the qbr platform as well with facial recognition and stuff like that and again these are dirt cheap you can pick them up for about 20 quid 30 if you want some of the snazzy ones and there's also a usb equivalent one as well and ultimately this extra little component here and i i uh based um support and ai analysis on your data when it comes to searches be it of the subject kind of just data storage file name kind it's hugely beneficial and again this is something we're hoping to see integrated a lot more in private servers like these ones in 2022 so again that's an option that's available to you there by those m2 slots but it is worth highlighting there is a slight downer because of the cpu that we're going to talk about a bit that's featured inside this device it's pci lanes that's basically all the arms it has to do all of the services and the hardware services are equipped to it in order to maintain that balance and spread things out fairly amongst all the different services on it those m2 slots are pcie gen 3 x 2 each so if we look at some of the ssds in the current generation of nas based ssds available on the market these are pcie gen three times four with performance at least in that architecture of about three thousand to two hundred to three thousand four hundred megabytes per second sequential read there but with these slots the most you could ever theoretically have is 2 000 because of the gen time gen 3 x 2 architecture which is going to be a real bummer for some of you that have got super fast ssds knocking around that you're going to put inside this and they're going to get slightly bottlenecked now bear in mind 2000 megs is still absolutely phenomenal to be playing with there obviously 2000 is a theoretical maximum and realistically it's going to be less than that but you can still rate them together you can still utilize that super fast storage internally when you're utilizing it and there's a lot to be said for what you can use that storage media for internally and once again even if they weren't bottlenecked to gen three times two bear in mind you're never gonna see that full gen three times four connectivity externally on this box so with the celeron processor inside that we're gonna talk about in a moment i'm prepared to let those two extra slots go because most people buying this device are buying it because it's a three bay middle ground nas between the two and the four bay and the fact that it has those two nvme slots inside practically as a bonus very rarely spoken loudly about i'm prepared to let that go about the gen 3 times 2 at this price point and architecture now let's talk about the internal architecture of this device if you can make it out and angle this just right you can see two things you can see a big silver heatsink here and you can see a sodium memory module there so first let's talk about the big old silver heatsink there that is what covers the intel celeron cpu inside this device now that cpu is the n5105 or n5095 because of intel cpu refreshes the pandemic hardware shortages and a million other factors that led to intel refreshing ranges way more frequently than normal it's going to be a hell of an 18 months for everyone in a nas world by the way in terms of cpus that cpu is 2.0 gigahertz uh in architecture it's a four core cpu that can be burst per core up to 2.9 gigahertz a lovely jump there it features a great floating point point on there iesni encryption the far more efficient power efficient encryption system that still keeps things very very safe um it's got integrated graphics as well uhd um so with that you've got your 4k and 1080p transcoding taken care of whether that's native transcoded within the box or you can take advantage of a lot of that transcoding in flex media server and we did run some plex tests on the same cpu here on the tbs 464 i'm not sure if they're live yet and again everything up to four heavy 4k stuff it ran like a dream with virtually no stuff and i include hdr in that as well but it was just when we started hitting 4k the h.264 stuff kind of started maxing the system a bit and h.265 and 10 bit hdr no way but still nonetheless that's still a great little architecture cpu to be dealing with there that cpu also opens the door to ddr4 memory up to 16 gig and this see this nas allows you to do that it's got the two slots inside there and the two slots without arriving with four gig of ddr4 ec um sorry non ecc by default so that's sodium ddr4 memory inside there and another free slot which allows you to upgrade the storage media on this device up to a maximum supported 16 gigabytes so again we are going to do some memory upgrading on this to see if we can exceed that and whether it's in any way usable because obviously that's outside of intel's own supported maximum on that on the two channels there but still nonetheless 16 gig of memory maximum on this new gen cpu oh at least new celeron gen cpu in this nas family is not to be sniffed at as twice that of the previous generation of devices in the five one and the five three series and on top of that or in the d series and on top of that they've not increased the price point from i can see significantly or indeed at all in most places over the previous gin making it an absolute no-brainer in terms of its architecture if you're looking at qnap for a nas you're looking at a desktop nas and once again you looked at a two bay and thought yeah a little small looked at a four-bar and went am i ever going to need that three bait and remember you don't have to fully populate it either can be quite appealing by that what i mean is you don't have to put three drives in this you don't even have to put the nvmes in it if you're gonna buy a two bay why not just spring the extra 80 to 100 knicker which i know is a lot but scale a little bit back in your storage if you want to buy two bay anyway buy this only fill two bays of storage and then you've got a third bay you can add storage to later and the two super fast nvme slots yes it lacks the pci upgradeability of the 51d and 5 3d but it more than makes up with it with a lot more architecture inside that massively expand what a system like this is capable of now in terms of software i as mentioned i'm not going to go into too much detail about the software on this device largely because i've gone into it in a greater degree of detail in previous videos i will say looking at this device up close that when it comes to its support of qt qts5 you're largely completely covered everything from the standard class file management applications from file station q search and q filing for business then on top of that you've got your tailored multimedia apps your music station your photo station your video station and of course q maggie photo recognition and multimedia console a single kind of whole system um multimedia indexing tool which never gets the respect it deserves in my opinion um those are all things that are possible and included with this to a high degree on top of that you've got the likes of flex media server through multimedia and of course when it comes to backup synchronization you've got hybrid backups in three you have got um the hyper backup protector you have got the likes of uh cloud management and of course cloud gateway tools in the form of virtual jbod and um the hybrid mount service and again licenses are included with this device then you've got surveillance with qvr pro qvr elite and even usb camera support as well with eight camera licenses included with qvr pro as well not to be overlooked and remember 2030 quid improve your ai um surveillance stuff for your deep video analysis for photo and thing and car recognition and more and again stand-alone surveillance as well with an hdmi monitor keyboard and mouse boom you've got remote access and local access too the software is very very evolved it's a lot going on with it and qts5 is you know the most responsive it's ever been i'm still not hugely enough with some of the icon sizes they've improved it vastly since the beta i'll give them that but with the exception of that qts is probably looking the best it's ever looked so far do i like this box i do i like what it stands for i like its architecture and if i was personally looking at entering the world of qnap for as a prosumer or a business user and a two bay looked too meager and i was just looking for a little bit more than a two bay this genuinely is a great choice it's a good architecture and it's probably the most balanced three bay that qnap have ever produced is it perfect of course not first and foremost it looks like a 70s or 80s bread bin i don't love the design i've never liked the design of a thread this three bay nas that said you're not going to be looking at it all the time it's going to be stored away somewhere in your home office and you're never going to see it so design into at least in terms of aesthetics isn't really that important what does matter is cooling what does matter is ventilation what does matter is efficiency and that's something when we have looked at three arrays in the past it has performed it has managed the ventilation it has kept our storage media cool another criticism i would say is the heatsinks that are arriving for those nvmes inside let's bring those back they seem a little small to me now i do a lot of nvmes this year it's been a very nvme heavy half second half of 2021 for those that followed this channel and that heatsink for me that's going to go directly adhesively onto the controller of the ssd that we install inside seemed a bit meager and if you saw when we were inside there the distance between the hard drives and those nvmes is exceedingly close yes there's going to be ventilation coming through there but not a vast amount of ventilation and these ssds when they're in operation they're going to get quite hot so i would maybe look into getting a bigger heatsink for those drives maybe not relying too much on those mini ones if you go for this device it's nice they've got them and at least they've made provisions for heatsinks just which they're a little bit bigger than that but this has been my full hardware review of this the ts364 again we've got some software stuff coming up on this as well as the more detailed and full of photos and graphics and images review over on nas compares linked in the description that should be live if not right now then within the next day or so if you have enjoyed this video or you found it useful to you then do click like it genuinely helps me understand what i'm doing right in these videos it makes each video better than the last if you want to learn more about this device as more videos come up on it click subscribe and the bell to be notified and we're going to be covering a lot of different nas systems as the new generation of these systems begin to arrive between now and spring 2022 so if you want us down you know stay on the fence there and you're wondering about buying stuff for next year subscribe to then you'll learn all the good things that are coming whether they're released or just in a release window lastly if you are still unsure about what you need for your storage with your home or business needs and you're just kind of well there's so much information use the free advice section over on those computers genuinely free man by two humans me and eddie the web guy we answer the emails that come through there we don't do anything with your email your email address it's yours we don't want it there's donate buttons use them ignore them it's up to you it's unbiased if you want to take advantage it's right there it might take us next day or so to answer your inquiry because it gets quite a lot of hammering and we have lives but we try to answer every single one thank you so much for watching and i'll see you on the next video

Channel: NASCompares

Views: 3,045

Keywords: 3 BAY NAS, 4K NAS, 5-Bay NAS, best nas, HDMI NAS, NAS Drive, NAS Guide, NAS QNAP, NAS Server, New NAS, New QNAP, New QNAP NAS, Plex NAS, QNAP 2021, QNAP 2022, QNAP NAS, QNAP NAS 2021, QNAP NAS 2022, QNAP NAS Drive, QNAP New NAS, Qnap TS-364, QNAP TS-364 NAS, QNAP TS-364 NAS Drive, QNAP TS-364 NAS Review, QNAP TS-364 NAS server, QNAP TS-364 Review, QNAP TS364, TS-364, TS-364 NAS, TS-364 NVMe NAS, TS-364 Review, TS-364 SSD NAS, TS-364-16G, TS-364-4G, TS-364-8G

Id: R7O_cll6uXY

Length: 33min 38sec (2018 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 07 2021