QNAP TS-451A

POWERFUL AND VERSATILE, WITH A DIRECT CONNECTION TO YOUR TV.

WITH A LARGE feature set and considerable processing power, the TS-451A takes its spot as our current top pick for four-bay consumer NASs. It’s not all perfect — the price is a little high and QNAP’s mobile apps are a bit of a mess — but for an overall solution, this is our go-to answer.

Let’s start with a couple of the most notable differentiators: a USB device port and an HDMI port. The USB device port lets you connect the QNAP directly to a PC and use it as you would USB storage. No need for network setup or even a network. Meanwhile, the HDMI port lets you connect the QNAP directly to a TV set, without the need for a smart TV or network media player. This isn’t just used for managing the NAS. A copy of Kodi (an outstanding media player) can be installed on the NAS for media playback of stuff you have stored on the QNAP or elsewhere on your network. You can use the supplied remote to control it, or use your mobile as the Kodi remote.

The PC-like capabilities of the QNAP extend to app availability as well. Built on a Linux foundation, there’s a huge host of available services and apps for the QTS operating system. Nearly everything you can think of is there: VPNs, camera surveillance (and a licence for two cameras is included), web photo and video galleries, telephony, backup and cloud sync, virtualisation (yes, you can run Windows 10 on it in a virtual machine), print server and much more. There’s even a karaoke app.

All this is built on an appealing hardware foundation, with a mid-range processor (for a NAS) and a case that makes it easy to install and swap drives. It was fast in our tests, and easily capable of live transcoding 1080p video. A top buy.