Network storage used to be a thing only found in business class networks. However, with the increase in popularity of home networking and the ability to easily share large amounts of data between PCs attached to the home network, network attach storage is quickly becoming an integral part of the modern home network. Family members are no longer confined to sharing files from one PC to another. In a typical PC to PC sharing setup a single hard drive is used to host the files. If that hard drive fails the data is lost. Network attached storage is available in multiple drive configurations. The most popular seem to be from two bays to five bays. QNAP's TS-451 is a four bay NAS that features an Intel 2.4 GHz Dual Core Celeron processor and is capable of expanding to 8 GB of RAM. But there is more to the TS-451 than just storage. QNAP is constantly working on the operating system to bring more features and capability to their storage devices. The QNAP TS-451 is more than just a simple storage device that sits on the network hosting files. [sc:sponsor sponsor="QNAP" product_link="http://www.qnap.com/i/en/product/model.php?II=143" product_name="TS-451" product_price_link="http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822107169" product_price="499.99" ] QNAP does a great job with the graphics for the TS-451. The box shows exactly what is being purchased and at a $500.00 price tag it should. I would want to know exactly what is included if I were to purchase it. Flipping the box around to the back, QNAP goes into detail about what the TS-451 can do. They break the features down into simple terms that someone without any networking experience can understand. The TS-451 comes packaged in rigid foam inserts and the NAS itself is wrapped in plastic to protect the finish from scratches and scuffs. The packing should do a good job of protecting the NAS from the hazards associated with shipping a product across the country. Specifications CPU Intel® Celeron® 2.41GHz dual-core processor (burst up to 2.58GHz) DRAM TS-451-4G: 4GB DDR3L RAM (2GB x 2) TS-451: 1GB DDR3L RAM Total memory slots: 2 (expandable up to 8GB) NOTE: 1. When installing two memory modules, please ensure that they are the same size and ideally use the same type of RAM for both memory slots. 2. For the information of RAM module installation and compatible NAS models, please refer to the QNAP RAM Module Installation Guide Flash Memory 512MB DOM Hard Disk Drive 4 x 3.5” or 2.5” SATA 6Gb/s, SATA 3Gb/s hard drive or SSD NOTE: 1. The system is shipped without HDD. 2. For the HDD compatibility list, please visit http://www.qnap.com/compatibility Hard Disk Tray 4 x Hot-swappable tray LAN Port 2 x Gigabit RJ-45 Ethernet port LED Indicators Status, LAN, USB, HDD 1-4 USB 2 x USB 3.0 port (Front: 1, Rear: 1) 2 x USB 2.0 port (Rear: 2) Support USB printer, pen drive, and USB UPS etc. HDMI 1 Buttons Power/Status, USB One-Touch-Backup, reset Alarm Buzzer System warning IR Receiver MCE-compatible Form Factor Tower Dimensions 177(H) x 180(W) x 235(D) mm 6.97(H) x 7.09(W) x 9.25(D) inch Weight Net: 3 kg (6.61 lbs) / Gross: 4.3 kg (9.48 lbs) Power Consumption (W) HDD standby: 15.85W S3 sleep: 0.55W In operation: 31.07W (with 4 x 1TB HDD installed) Temperature 0-40˚C Humidity 5~95% RH non-condensing, wet bulb: 27˚C Power Supply External Power Adapter, 90W, 100-240V Secure Design Kensington security slot for theft prevention Fan 1 x quiet cooling fan (12 cm, 12V DC) Design and specifications are subject to change without notic A Closer Look at the QNAP TS-451 The QNAP TS-451 is one of the smaller NAS devices that I have come across. It has a footprint of 6.97(H)x7.09(D)x9.259(D). The TS-451's styling is elegant. The white exterior offset by a silver band on the left side of the device is unobtrusive. The front of the QNAP TS-451 features the four drive bays. On the left in the silver band the LED indicators of the system status, LAN, and all four hard drives. The IR receiver is located just under the LED indicators. A power button and one touch copy button are next and an USB 3.0 port is featured at the bottom. The left side of the QNAP TS-541 is fairly simple. There is a small vent near the front in order to draw cool air in to help with CPU and motherboard component cooling. On the back of the QNAP TS-451 a 120mm fan is the most prominent feature. The fan speeds can be adjusted either manually or by the system and is configured via the GUI interface. The I/O for the TS-541 contains a power connector, 1 USB 3.0, 2 USB 2.0, 2 Gigabit LAN and an HDMI port. A password and network reset button is at the very top. Rounding out the exterior of the TS-451 is the right panel. This panel has a sticker on it that contains the Cloud Key. This is used to get the system set up quickly. Go to the website and enter the key. The process gets the initial configuration of the NAS done very quickly and all you have to do is answer a few questions. TS-451 Internals Pulling the TS-451 apart was very simple. Remove two screws and slide the cover off and you'll have access to replace and upgrade the memory. Our unit came with 4GB of DDR3 1600MHz RAM. The TS-451 can be upgraded to 8 GB of RAM. The Intel Celeron is passively cooled by the heatsink located in the center of the board. The drive backplane is connected via a PCI-e 4x slot. Just to the upper right of the PCI-e slot is the DOM that houses the units operating system and configuration. The ASMEDA ASM1442 handles the HDMI output for the QNAP TS-451 A Fintek F71869AD IC handles the hardware monitoring and the IR capabilities of the TS-451. A pair of Intel WGI210AT Ethernet controllers are responsible for all the networking on the QNAP TS-451. The backplane for the drives is a SATA 3 6 Gb/s riser card that plugs into a PCI-e 4x slot on the motherboard. Hardware Installation Modders-Inc is proud to welcome Seagate as a sponsor for our storage reviews. Seagate provided 4 TB NAS hard drives for this review. The NAS hard drives are purpose built and are better suited for life inside a storage enclosure. Seagate offers NAS drives from 2TB to 4TB in capacity. NAS HDD 4TB +Rescue ST4000VN003 NAS HDD 4TB ST4000VN000 NAS HDD 3TB ST3000VN000 NAS HDD +Rescue 2TB ST2000VN001 NAS HDD 2TB ST2000VN000 Capacity 4TB 4TB 3TB 2TB 2TB Interface SATA 6Gb/s SATA 6Gb/s SATA 6Gb/s SATA 6Gb/s SATA 6Gb/s Typical Weight 610g 610g 610g 535g 535g Maximum Length 146.99mm 146.99mm 146.99mm 146.99mm 146.99mm Maximum Height 26.11mm 26.11mm 26.11mm 26.11mm 26.11mm Maximum Width 101.60mm 101.60mm 101.60mm 101.60mm 101.60mm Cache 64MB 64MB 64MB 64MB 64MB Maximum Operating Shock 80Gs 80Gs 80Gs 80Gs Operating Temperature 70°C 70°C 70°C 70°C 70°C Getting the drives mounted in the trays is a simple affair. Flip the drives over, slide the drive into the tray and use the provided silver screws to secure the drives to the tray. QNAP also made provisions for SSDs and 2.5" drives. They are attached in three points on the bottom of the tray using the black screws that are provided. Insert the assembled trays and drives into the unit and lock them in and the deivce is ready to be connected to power and the network. QNAP TS-451 Operating System Initial Setup One the QNAP TS-451 has completed the boot process, simply go to http://start.qnap.com and enter the Cloud Key to start the set up process. QNAP also provides another utility called QFinder that will run through a similar set up. During the set up process you will need to answer a few questions. Questions such as what you'd like to call the NAS, the type of RAID, the Time Zone need to be answered. If you want to chance your answers from the defaults, just click on the item and fill in what you'd like. During the set up, the QNAP TS-451 defaulted to RAID 5. Just by clicking on the item, you can select which RAID configuration you'd like by selecting it from the drop down box. After the changes are made a confirmation box will appear verifying these are the settings you'd like. After the settings have been selected, click on the Proceed button and the software will begin to configure the NAS. For our RAID 10 set up, this process took around 10 minutes to complete. Once everything is complete, a congratulations screen will appear. From here you can dive into the NAS Operating system, called QTS. QNAP TS-451 Operating System Administration Console Click on the login button on the top of the screen to access the username and password fields. Upon successful login, as QTS quick Start guide will appear. QNAP has some useful information for those that are not familiar with the OS and want to take full advantage of the NAS. Here is the QTS Desktop. Shortcuts to frequently accessed items can be created here. It saves time as you don't have to dig through the menus in order to find what you're looking for. Resource monitoring is very quickly accessed by clicking on the green gauge at the lower right of the screen. The monitoring page gives the user all the information needed to determine if the TS-451 and the drives are operating properly. Temperature and fan speed is listed. Scheduled tasks are shown as well as CPU and memory utilization and network utilization. We are going to start with the first shortcut on the desktop, called Control Panel. The control panel is where all of the configuration for the QNAP TS-451 is done. There are five sections under the control panel. Here is the Storage Manager. The storage manager is where all disk and volume management takes place. RAID array configurations are created or deleted here. If you delete a RAID array the data on the volume will be lost so be sure to back up your data first. One of the interesting things QNAP has done that I have seen on many much more expensive storage devices, is add the ability to cache to SSD. A safe configuration for a four bay NAS would be a RAID 1 array using two disks, a hot spare and in the last bay a SSD drive. Caching to a SSD allows faster access to frequently used data. Data is stored on the cache drive temporarily then written back to the RAID array if changes are made. For those users that would like to use the TS-451 in a virtualized environment iSCSI is available. Simply create the iSCSI target then map the target to a LUN. Then you can attach the LUN to your virtual host. The network page of the control panel is where the network settings are configured. The TS-451 has dual 1Gb network adapters. Supported USB WI-FI are configured in the Wi-Fi tab of the networking control panel. Since the QNAP TS-451 does have dual network adapters, teaming or fail-over can be enabled. This allows one of the links to go down and the data will still be accessible. All of the available teaming can be used on a non-managed network switch except for the IEEE 802.3ad. This is also known as LACP or Link Aggregation Control Protocol and requires a switch that supports LACP. The LACP configurations on both the switch and the NAS must match or it will not work. The general tab in the hardware menu enables the hard drives to spin down or go into standby when not in use thus reducing power consumption. The fan speeds can be configured on the smart fan tab. The user can choose to let the operating system control the fan speed, configure custom fan speeds based on temperatures, or choose low, medium and high settings. In the network services sub menu of the control panel is where a few need to have items are located. In networking not every operating system shares equally with other operating systems. For example, sharing files between a Mac and a Windows based PC can be a pain. In the Win/Mac/NFS menu settings can be configured to ensure that all operating systems have access to all the data available. Typically when a user shares a drive from one PC to another, or from a server to a client, if a file is deleted then it is deleted, there is not a network recycle bin. On the TS-451 a network recycle bin is available and can be turned off. The network recycle bin can be configured to purge old data and the schedule is based on a time line. Even if the user does a Shift-DEL on the file, it will still wind up in the network recycle bin. It is a great feature to have however, the down side is that it will use up more space on the NAS. Applications and Media Services The QNAP TS-451 comes with a lot of useful applications. The NAS can act as a domain controller, or host web pages via the Web Server application. It has built in antivirus capabilities to help keep the data stored on the NAS safe. Some of the more advanced applications include a syslog server to keep track of logs from networking devices and servers. It can also host a VPN service. The TS-451 can act as a mini server but it can also function as a full featured media center. The NAS can host all of you iTunes library as well as your video library. Users on your network can browse to the NAS and play files. But by plugging the QNAP TS-451 into your TV or monitor via HDMI and a mouse and keyboard or the optional remote control, it also becomes a full featured media PC using the HD station application. The HybridDesk station is a collection of applications and a dashboard which enables launching of applications such as XBMC; an entertainment hub and media library. The full package features some useful applications for playing music, watching YouTube videos and a couple of games. There are many more applications available for download on QNAP's website. Testing System Configuration Case Cooler Master Cosmos II SE CPU Intel i7 4770K Motherboard MSI Z97m Gaming Ram 2 GB G.Skill F3-12800CL9q DDR3-1600 GPU MSI GTX 970 OC Hard Drives Samsung 840 EVO 256gb SSD Western Digital black 500 gb 7200 RPM HDD Power Supply NXZT Hale v2 1000 Watt power supply Four Seagate 4 TB 7200 RPM desktop drives were installed and used in the NAS tests. A dual port Intel network card was installed in the system. In our testing I used the Thecus N5550 to get comparison numbers against the TS-451. Both NAS devices use 4 GB of ram and the same Seagate NAS hard drives. The major difference between the two is the processor. The Thecus N5550 used the Intel Atom D2550 1.86 GHz dual core CPU whereas the QNAP TS-451 uses the Intel Celeron 2.41GHz (2.58 GHz Turbo). Network Layout For all tests the NAS was configured to use the a single network interface. One CAT 6 cable was connected to the Cisco 2960 from the NAS and one CAT 6 cable was connected to the workstation from the switch. Testing was done on the workstation with only 1 network card active. The switch was cleared of any configuration and left in a unconfigured state. Software To test NAS Performance we use four applications; The Intel NAS Performance toolkit, Crystal Disk Mark, Atto Storage benchmark, and Anvil Storage utilities. The Intel NAS Performance toolkit simulates various tasks for storage devices such as video streaming, copying files and folders to and from the NAS as well as creating content directly on the NAS. To limit caching, a 2GB G.Skill memory module was used in all tests. All options in the Performance toolkit were left that the defaults. The NAS performance test is free to download. You can pick up a copy for yourself here. To run Crystal Disk Mark, Atto, and Anvil storage utilities, a network share was mapped as a drive letter. All tests were run a total of three times then averaged to get the final result. RAID 0, RAID 10, and RAID 5 are all tested. Tests for RAID 5 were run after the array was fully synchronized RAID Information Images courtesy of Wikipedia JOBD or Just a Bunch Of Disks is exactly what the name describes. The hard drives have no actual raid functionality and are spanned at random data is written at random. RAID 0 is a stripe set and data is written across the disks evenly. The advantage of RAID 0 is speed and increased capacity. With RAID 0 there is no redundancy anddata loss is very possible. RAID 1 is a mirrored set and data is mirrored from one drive to another. The advantage of RAID 1 is data redundancy as each piece of data is written to both disks. The disadvantage of RAID 1 is write speed is decreased as compared to RAID 0 due to the write operation is performed on both disks. RAID 1 capacity is that of the smallest disk. RAID 10 combines the 1st two raid levels and is a mirror of a stripe set. This allows for better speed of a RAID 0 array but the data integrity of a RAID 1 array. RAID 5 is a stripe set with parity. RAID 5 requires at least 3 disks. Data is striped across each disk, and each disk has a parity block. RAID 5 allows the loss of one drive without losing data. The advantage to RAID 5 is read speeds increase as the number of drives increase but the disadvantage is write speeds are slower as the number of drives is increased. There is overhead with RAID 5 as the parity bit needs to be calculated and with software RAID 5 there is more of a performance hit. RAID 6 expands on RAID 5 by adding an additional parity block to the array that is distributed across all the disks. Since there are two parity blocks in the array more overhead is used with a RAID 6 array. For a full breakdown of RAID levels, take a look at the Wikipedia article here. QNAP TS-451 Test Results Intel NAS Performance ToolKit QNAP TS-451 Test Results Crystal Disk Mark QNAP TS-451 Test Results Anvil Storage Utilities Conclusion & Final Thoughts The performance results speak for themselves. The QNAP TS-451 clearly leads the benchmark results and sometimes up to 50% faster than the Thecus N5550. However, don't discount the fact that we are testing two different processors and there are bound to be performance differences between them. There are a couple of reasons that we tested against two different processors. Number one, there are a lot of NAS units out on the market that use Atom processors and some that use Celeron or even Core2Duo processors. I wanted to show the difference in performance between the two and since this is our 1st NAS with something other than an Atom I felt it was important to show the performance differences. The QNAP TS-451 is one of the fastest NASes that I have tested to date. After setting up the unit for benchmarking, I placed the TS-451 on the network and moved the shared files to it and over the last couple of weeks there have been no complaints. Currently in my household there are 6 people all with at least one PC. Not only does the QNAP TS-451 host files, but it also keeps track of things on my network such as syslogs from my switches and router/firewall. I did get around to setting up the iTunes media server and now anyone with an Apple device can stream music from the library. Our digital copies of the movies are stored on this device as well and it acts as a media streamer. Recently I've had 3 different movie streams going at a time and no one reported back any stuttering or quality issues. During network transfer tests, every NAS that I have tested shows upwards of 30% (or more)CPU utilization. Depending on the RAID type is should be expected as the CPU has to do the parity calculations. However, I didn't expect the difference between the Atom and Celeron processors to as large. It should go without saying that the non-Atom based NAS has a large advantage in some cases. However, I don't want to turn everyone away from the Atom based NAS. They have their place and are inexpensive. QNAP''s QTS interface is extremely easy to navigate and easy to use. From the initial setup all the way down to the advanced features QTS 4.1 feels very well polished. Health information is always accessible so you can see how your NAS is holding up. This is one of the more polished interfaces that I have used. At this point in time, for the home or small office consumer, we are financially limited to a gigabit ethernet network. Ten gigabit ethernet is on the market but it is extremely costly to implement. A simple 8-port switch costs upwards of $800.00 and RJ-45 network cards cost around $500.00. But with time, 10 gigabit networks will find their way down to the consumer level. One gigabit network bandwidth is maxed out at around 125-130 Mb/s mathematically and if you take into account network overhead in the range of 10-15% 110-115 Mb/s is a real number that you can expect to see on your network. Network tests show the TS-451 is able to saturate a single 1 gigabit link and the results are right in line with what one should get transferring data over the network. It is the additional features and capabilities of the TS-451 that set it apart in my opinion. The option to add the device to a Windows Domain and add and remove domain accounts directly to the shares, the ability to set up a syslog server, and the ability to act as a a media PC which connects directly to the TV are all features that should be included in this level of NAS and brings added value to the device. Currently the QNAP TS-451 retails for about $499.99 without drives. However, if you take into account the speed and added features the price is well worth it. If you are looking for a powerful, small, and elegant NAS the QNAP TS-451 should be on your list. With all the features and capabilities this little box can provide, I don't think you will be disappointed. [sc:must_have_award ]