Qnap TV-961X
QNAP’s loaded this unit with every feature you could want from a NAS and still managed to keep the price reasonable.
QNAP’s TVS-951X NAS is best described as the “kitchen sink” of NAS units. There isn’t a feature that one could reasonably desire that isn’t included by default on the TVS-951X. That doesn’t necessarily mean the TVS-951X is perfect, but QNAP has shoved heaps of goodies in this box.
Kicking things off is an Intel Celeron 3865U CPU. Due to packing an Intelbased CPU, this means there’s an enormous suite of applications available, if there’s a particular service or app you want to run on your NAS, the Celeron 3865U will take it. An added bonus of the Celeron 3865U CPU is QuickSync video encoding and decoding support, so Plex will transcode videos without breaking a sweat.
Out of the box QNAP equips the TVS-951X with either 2GB or 8GB of RAM depending on how much cash you shell out, but can be expanded out to 32GB via the two DDR4 SODIMM slots. This amount of RAM plus the Intel CPU make the TVS-951X very capable for running most server style apps.
Like many QNAP units the TVS-951X has an HDMI port. This unique feature allows you to plug it directly into a TV to either watch videos directly off the NAS instead of the network. It’s more likely however, that the HDMI port will be used to hook up a monitor or TV and used to display the output of QNAP’s surveillance camera software, so you can monitor a group of cameras all at once. The TVS-951X does support a remote control, but oddly it’s an optional purchase.
What makes the TVS951X unique is the inclusion of nine - yes, nine - hard drive bays. There are five 3.5-inch slots for your big beefy storage needs, plus four 2.5-inch bays that are primarily designed to be filled with SSDs and used as a cache. Using QNAP’s “Qtier” technology, frequently accessed data is automatically shifted between the HDDs and SSDs for improved performance. You can also manually set applications to be run off the SSDs and leave the HDDs for bulk storage only. It’s a very nifty way to leverage the rapidly falling prices for commodity 2.5-inch SSDs without having to sacrifice the bulk storage pricing of traditional HDDs.
To round the package out, there’s a 10GbE LAN port, as well as a traditional Gigabit Ethernet port. While you can certainly hook the 10GbE port up to a switch and enjoy using the TVS-951X that way, it’s more likely users of this class of NAS will connect their desktop PC with a 10GbE network interact directly to the 10GbE port on the NAS and use it as a form of very fast directly attached storage for editing video.
Most people probably don’t need the additional 2.5-inch bays the TVS-951X is based around and for many users, 10GbE is more of a luxury than a necessity. But if you do require those features and can make use of them, the TVS-951X is a good buy compared to the rest of the market at a relatively low street price of $1,200.