QNAP TVS-h674-i5-32G-US 6 Bay High-Speed Desktop NAS with 12th Gen Intel® Core™ CPU, up to 128GB DDR4 RAM, 2.5 GbE Networking and PCIe Gen 4 expandability (Diskless)

Replacing an older WSS server. Was astounded to discover the drive trays in the QNAP are plastic! So much for additional heat sinking from the trays, or security of the drives. The key lock is a joke on these. For one, the same key is used on every NAS. For two, you can unlock the drive with needle nose pliers faster than you can unlock with the key, and not damage anything. Hoping there is quality/performance in the rest of this unit to justify that price...

Finally splurged to get a higher CPU for running more Plex streams (with video acceleration of the CPU) and this 6-core i5 does not disappoint. Can Plex stream 1080 and 2160 to other formats with ease. Six 3.5" drives, and two m.2 drives. Using the 3.5" in a Raid5, and a Raid1 out of the m.2 for a higher speed volume, was going to use it for cache but QuTS Hero wont use it for cache for the other volume so I turned it into a volume to itself. I upped the RAM to have plenty of room for RAM cache as well as apps, Plex, and VMs. Fan can spin up during heavy Plex scans or transcode, otherwise you can only hear the clicks of the HDDs under normal usage. QNAP provides regular patches and security updates for many years on their products, always very well supported.

This is my step-up to a NAS with an Intel Core CPU and the QuTS Hero OS. Kinda kick myself for not making the leap sooner as it has been performing flawlessly (early days still). I started my QNAP NAS journey with the now legacy TS-459 Pro machines continuing with the TS-451 and TS-653D as my storage and computational requirements grew. End goal for this machine is to use it for processing and storing large file size photo images. I'm probably being overly critical only awarding four stars as I knew going in that the NAS did not offer 10Gbe connectivity (solved with the QNAP QXG-10G1T NIC) but puzzled why the NAS wasn't offered with it out-of-the-box.

Just works. Popped in spinning rust and some m.2 SSDs and an nVidia graphics card and it's now hosting a lot of services and it just works. The interface is mostly okay, no real problems. Storage, transcoding, container hosting, all works great.

I have had all brands of NAS. This one had the best CPU but doesn't seem to be the fastest. Hopefully will keep tweaking the OS for more performance.