Should You Still Buy the QNAP TS-453D NAS?

hello and welcome back and if you're watching this video it means that there's a good chance that you're either on the verge of or about to click the buy button on the ts253d 453d or 653d the 53d series from kuna that arrived in spring 2020 is still particularly popular even now at the end of 2021 but a number of you who have seen this device maybe on a number of sales at the likes of black friday prime day end of year sale or anything are still wondering is it worth taking the plunge on it is there better things out there are you buying an old model when it might be better to sit on the fence and wait a little bit longer and that's what we're going to do in today's video we're going to talk about the hardware the software and ultimately help you decide whether this nas has still got its place and deserves your data here at the end of 2021 [Music] so let's get straight into it what do we like about this device well when it first arrived on the scene last year has to be said that even then in spring 2020 it did have pretty much better hardware than any of the smb small media business or prosumer tier of devices out there from the likes of the synology ds920 from the likes of asustor you know the likes of terrormaster any of them out there it was kind of giving you the best value for money out there now a lot of that hardware can be immediately shown to you first and foremost it was a 2.5 gbe nas it's got two 2.5 gbe ports on it while still arriving at the same price that's one gigabit net for pretty much every brand right now at the time of recording when there are no sales on this device the going rate for this on average to compare against whatever price you're looking at is about 500 nikka for the four bay and we're just gonna look at the four bay now it's not the two or six um so it's 500 pounds uk it's around 550 to 600 u.s about 900 australian dollars it's about 600 to 650 there in europe depending if you average it out across france and germany and italy and stuff like that and then finally in canada county uh canada canadia in canada about 700 to 750 canadian so whatever price you're looking at for the four bay that should give you some idea of how good discount that should be but even now at the end of 2021 the hardware inside this is still better than most of its compen contemporaries out there now it's not just that 2.5 gbe across two ports at the same price as everyone and of course by everyone i mean synology uh have at one gbe but it's the fact this device is quite scalable with a pcie slot there and i'm sorry the plate is missing off the top of that because i've used it so much um that pcie slot on it allows you to add 10 gigabit ethernet add more ethernet ports add more usb ports add a wi-fi six card add 5 gbe add all manner of supported pcie upgrade cards including internal performance upgrade cards like m2 ssd upgrade cards like this one over here which allows you to add both a 10 gigabit ethernet port and a 10 gb e port there so again there's a lot of scalability and a lot that you can do with the device in its system life kidnap i've got a bunch of expansion boxes that cover two and four and eight and bigger expansion boxes meaning you're not limited to just the two the four or the six base of the nas that you go for there on top of that it's got hdmi out that's right it's got an hdmi port there on the rear that supports 4k at 60 frames per second with a dedicated parallel running application that has hd station that allows you to run it independently of the nas and therefore enjoy movies from your sofa set up a surveillance platform with keyboard video mouse kvm as well as installing flex media server and a bunch of other applications with a huge variety of third-party apps available and we will get to that later on on top of that the hardware inside arriving with four gig of ddr4 memory and an intel celeron processor the j4125 although it's not going to exactly you know like break your neck in terms of performance if you're utilizing intel core or the like or a xeon at this price point you are never going to get that kind of hardware anyway and this device arriving with hardware transcoding on board aesni encryption on board a great floating point there and the ability to run many many apps is still a great bonus on this device and then there's a little thing a lot of people overlook with this device and that goes for the two the four and the six bay it's actually quite quiet um it's chassis is kind of very compact it's plastic all the way around and the trays themselves are quite firmly put in there they're plastic trays inside but it's surprisingly quiet now obviously if you use my enterprise level hard drives you know 8 10 tb and above or you go for like exos drives ultra star stuff like that then the noise of those drives is gonna eep through you just simply can't silence those but even this six bay it's got two rear fans on it we've had this running about a meter away from this camera in the past and very rarely do you guys hear it it's a surprisingly quietness i'm not going to call it silent but i will say the 53d series compared with other desktop that is out there is surprisingly discreet in terms of its kind of ambient noise in your environment and again the 53d series is meant to be the middle of their portfolio it's kind of stepping away from the budget ends uk series your pe series yeah stuff like that and of course it's more affordable than the big guns there at the top the xt series and the 770 series and stuff like that so in terms of how it performs qnap john software qts the latest version qts5 although it doesn't support zfs because that cpu is just not got it in it it supports all of the applications currently available with qts5 that includes your surveillance your multimedia your business your backups your cloud gateways and more in fact let's have a look at that software now a quick look at the software when you log into this nas via that a quick look at the software when you do log in to a 53d nas from synology does show that qts5 has improved a lot over its predecessors for example the responsiveness of the screen in general and a lot of the applications and security have been tightened quite notably now if you do go into the application obviously the storage manager and the way things are handled not only with remote access storage and bolted on storage from cloud and other nas devices are pretty good but even you know the storage noobs that aren't really looking are really pushing these devices to their very limits do have a lot of tools and a lot of ease of access and understanding of what's going on here and again if you are someone that's migrating from cloud services the ability to bolt on cloud providers like google drive and adding them to your system with the appearance of localized storage as well as taking advantage absolutely more enterprise level feeling things like iscsi and remote level access are all things that are available to you very early doors the scalability of this device and what you can do with it whether you're a home user or a business user is actually pretty impressive now if you are looking at this device for backups for example there is a huge number of backup tools available for you to a very degree of usage most um atypical users hbs3 will be enough for them the ability to bolt on different areas of backup routine and um back up the nas or individual files and folders to cloud devices uh cloud storage be they blob or just share drives as well as to other nases remotely uh usb drives and more and if you're an apple time machine user you can go ahead and add many of them from local devices with your mac there with apple time machine as well as utilizing usb copy buttons like the one i mentioned connected to the front and other protocols as well and the learning curve isn't quite as steep as you might like just bear in mind that because of the qnaps notification panel and the way alerts are handled by the machine sometimes you can feel a little bombarded by notifications bombarded by security alerts now it really does come down to what kind of user you are whether you're overly cautious or someone that utilizes your device um quite you know free uh haphazardly because maybe you're utilizing particularly strict vpn or firewall rules now the system does have numerous policies and counsellors and recommendations it can make as you can see here with the firewall enabled internally the malware remover internally anti-virus scanning constantly and with the security checkup allowing you to do a report based on the settings you've selected what can be changed what can be improved upon and even changing the security policy on the fly towards a stricter looser one or a custom one if you choose and again all of that but sometimes in notification panel as you can see here you will get a lot of alerts that can appear more intimidating than they are in the case of this system when i was restarting this device i restarted it a little bit too haphazardly when i was doing a ups video a while ago consequently it would be very easy to be fantastically intimidated by all of this when really i know what the error is now again that is then being overly cautious which a number of you may applaud and again with remote level access and so many different kinds of process once again from that bolting of network or remote storage to even more enterprise level stuff with cue objects using amazon s3 and the like as well as box safe for those of you taking advantage of google workspace or office 365 online even the vm backups wiz hypervisors like vmware and hyper v there's something there for you too and switching back to the home users you've got the likes of plex media server you've got the likes of multimedia tools on this device in the form of photo station music station and more so again lots of tools to enjoy your multimedia support of a dlna media server plug-in if you choose and arguably the best ai powered photo recognition tool available on any nas platform that covers not only facial recognition and locational data but with automated thing recognition really taking the hassle out of archiving and cataloging and referencing and searching you know decades of digital photos with the ai recognizing the contents of things again not just faces but recognizing items and locations too all of that built in all with the safe and secure knowledge that sharing files checking the background information of files and accessing them be it by the web browser or mobile applications incredibly easy with all of that lovely scraped metadata getting lots of information on the photos as you take them and with numerous abilities to share files via a local area network or remotely over the internet with now enhanced provisions in place with regards to remote access there's a lot to be said for it and again if you're a surveillance user with eight camera licenses for that qvr pro application the ability to add usb cameras even um low level ai powered photo uh surveillance as well with qvr face which again you can take advantage of adapters to improve the performance because i think that would push that um intel celeron processor a little hard but still nonetheless for what you're paying here you are getting a lot of features and functionality and although it may appear to have a slightly steeper learning curve than what you see from the likes of synology there i do think it is a much more customizable package and again that customization goes one step further when you look at applications like multimedia console a fantastically simple idea that no other brand has seemingly done multimedia console allowing you to effectively um control from a single vantage point all of the indexing of your system and that goes down to thumbnail generation that goes down to transcoding but ultimately giving you the ability to tell the apps where to search and where not to search for their relevant files not the other way around as handled by other i um other nas providers out there one thing you may have noticed while going through this video is as i flick between all these windows there's been the odd delay and i've got a saying i will touch on this at the end of the video that's one of the areas where i think qnap's qts5 platform can sometimes struggle when you multitask you know quite fast and if you want to do two to three things the system will do incredibly well but the minute you start trying to do multiple applications all at once it can lead to a little delay in the background now this can be counted with ssd cache and this can be counted in a number of smaller ways but for example if you were running a virtual machine or an ubuntu linux vm now bear in mind again you can download vms for free directly onto this nas from within these applications but if you run that and then maybe you run the hdmi output as well with all of those tools as well you may find the rest of the system will be sluggish now it's easy to say that's because of memory and cpu utilization fine but there's also the fact that qts runs at its best when you're doing a small handful of things at the same time and not trying to multitask five to ten things at once on this system at least when you go to more powerful nazis particularly the zfs equipped systems you know this becomes far less a limitation but just bear in mind if you're looking at the two four or six by five three d series now that as long as you stick within a small product of tasks at any given time you're going to be fine so as you can see this system does do a lot but it's all about how much you expect out of it and not so much being realistic but understanding where limitations can be on this device because it's not always going to be good no nas is perfect no better is in terms of hardware limitations i've got to say one of the things that you may not like about this device that may make you remove your finger from the buy button and hover over to the remove is the fact that as good as that pcie slot is on this device the pcie architecture of this nas across the 53d series isn't fantastic because the cpu inside has only so much resources known as cpu lanes and within the chipset the kind of way things are laid out these have to be given out to certain features the hdmi port the 2.5 gbe the usb ports and so there's only a finite amount of resources left the result is that although the 2 bay device which has got less of its resources being spread out has a pcie gen 2 x 4 slot which allows the system to cap up to 2 000 megabytes per second throughput between a connected card and the internal system the 4 and the 6 bay on the other hand even though it supports cars like this that are both nvme ssd and 10gbe on board that pcie slot inside there only provides up to a thousand megabytes per second connectivity between the connected card and the system because it's pcie gen two times two now on the face of it thousand makes who cares that's great if i'm putting in a 10 gb card woohoo 10 gb card 10 000 megs 10 oh sorry 1 000 megabytes per second 1000 megs from the card into the system great but if you start using m2 ssd upgrade cards and stuff like that a lot of those ssds even some of the older gen 3 times 4 ssds out there provide 2 to 3 000 megs which will then be bottlenecked onto that 1000 meg slot there so you gotta know that before you pull the trigger if you're thinking of utilizing this for like 10 gbe editing know that although you can get 10 gbe on here with a card if you put a two port card in there if you put a combo card or an msr card oh sorry an nvme ssd upgrade card in there there's a bit of a bottleneck there outside of just one 10gb e port another thing worth remembering of course is qnap i've had a bit of a bumpy road these last 12 to 18 months it would be remiss not to at least consider the fact that there's been a couple of times where they have been the target for kind of nefarious individuals that are trying to break into their system now qnap aren't alone in this let's face it the bigger you are the larger the target there is on your back look at cloud providers look at instant messaging services look at your internet service provider all of these are companies are constantly being bombarded by hacking attempts and intrusions and malware and more and then it's a question of rolling up your updates and i think qnap isn't quite firm enough about their updates to the end users or maybe preventing certain services from running without the latest upgrades something we've seen in the likes of xbox and playstation and stuff like that where they won't let you access some online services without updating to the latest firmware yet it's rigid and arguably there's an argument for both sides and not everyone's going to agree on this but we can't ignore the fact that you know provide a couple of security snafus because of those intrusions and ransomware attacks by people online that perhaps people aren't as satisfied as they could have been in that 18 months so it looks like they're all rolled up but let's not get forgetful now shall we and of course as shown there in the software and we went through it it it does everything it says it will but if you try to do too much at any once any one time the system will try to do it all at once and it will spread itself way too thinly and i think qts could stand to do a better job of putting jobs in a good order but at least allow you to line those jobs up not just let the end user who's clicking wildly installing 15 things at once to expect all 15 15 of these things to happen at the same time so again where the limitations live in this box again the two the four the six bay device a lot of those limitations can be wildly avoided or completely never even acknowledged by the end user if the end user is just aware or keeps perspective about how they deal with the nas not all of them things like that pcie upgrade slot there will bum some people out and maybe kind of could be a little louder about that but on this device if you see it on sale right now it's still one of the best nazis they've ever put out at that price point but the a series and the b series that came before and indeed the pros all the years before this has been the best balance we've ever seen from the brand to try and juggle all of that hardware so again yes they'll probably be better and newer units next year in a refresh of this series that's happens every two to two and a half years but they're going to cost more they're going to arrive in a while and you've got to weigh up just how much better they're going to be compared to how much time they're going to take and how much more that unit's going to cost me personally if you ask my recommendation i would still recommend the 53d series if you're looking at it on black friday prime day some sort of january sale or you're getting a bit of a bargain thank you so much for watching i hope you enjoyed this video if you did click like it helps me understand what i'm doing right in these videos and make each video better than the last also i've linked to an article where i talk about this snazz and whether it's still worth buying with far more information than we covered in this video for you to follow so do check that out click subscribe if you want to learn more and if you are watching this video because of some sales during black friday again or prime day or whatever i will be covering those through on this channel as i look and find good deals for you guys and throw them out too just to let you know they're out there but thank you so much for watching and i'll see you next time

Channel: NASCompares

Views: 4,358

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Id: PZSuDFaBcYM

Length: 20min 26sec (1226 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 18 2021