QNAP TS-453 Pro Unboxing

Hi everyone,
I have just unboxed the super-cool QNAP TS-453 Pro 4bay NAS over on Youtube. In the video which is linked below, I have expressed my first impressions of the product as well as a brief overview of the QNAP TS-453.

The first question many people ask is why do I need a NAS?
There are a few basic reasons why you should consider a NAS:

• Centralised Storage & Sharing – A NAS allows you to store all your digital media such as photos, videos, documents, music etc. in one central place and then allow access to these from any computer, tablet, phone or TV in your house. Some NAS like the QNAP and Synology also allow you to access these whilst away from home.
• Expandable Storage – Nearly everything is going digital and our need to store these digital items will only grow with time. By digital items, I am referring to your photos, music, home videos, movies etc. A NAS can store terabytes of this data and can be expanded as your needs grow, either by adding more drives or upgrading your drives to larger capacity ones as prices fall.
• Protection – Media such as your photos are very precious and the last thing you want is to lose years of memories due to a hard drive failure, house fire or theft of a PC. By keeping your media stored on a NAS you can get two levels of protection. Firstly, by configuring the NAS as RAID array, your data will be stored multiple times across the drives so that if one drive fails, you can still recover your files. Most RAID configurations support one drive failure. In order to protect against multiple drive failures at the same time, you can install apps on the NAS to automatically backup the files at regular intervals to a cloud service such as Dropbox.

Getting back to this particular NAS from QNAP, I particularly like it due to the built in support for virtualisation of programs and other cool stuff. Another rather unique feature on the QNAP range of NAS is the HDMI-out port which allows you to directly connect a monitor in order to view, setup and maintain your NAS in a much clearer way. In addition, the HDMI out port allows you to position the TS-453 Pro near your TV and use it as a media centre with the installation of apps like XBMC.

I was pleasantly surprised with the build quality of the QNAP in particular. The entire system felt very sturdy and the design choices made my QNAP such as the brushed aluminium casing and glossy front panel really do stand out. The QNAP features a 2GHz Intel Celeron quad core processor and has the ability to expand the ram up to 8GB. These specs mean it will fly through standard NAS tasks such as file serving of streaming videos. Where the specs come into their own is for virtualisation or acting as the video store for multiple CCTV cameras. These are some pretty serious specs for a NAS at this price point which adds to my excitement for getting to play with the QNAP.

There are two versions of the QNAP TS-453 Pro, a 2Gb RAM model which is perfect for the usual NAS duties and an 8 Gb RAM model that is better if you are planning on running a number of virtual machines on it. The closest Synology competitor is the Synology DiskStation DS415+ which runs a quad core Atom processor and comes with 2Gb RAM. The RAM on the QNAP is upgradeable whereas on the Synology it is not. The QNAP offers much better value in terms of hardware and performance but the Synology has the better software/operating system.

You can buy all these NAS devices from Amazon:

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I hope you’ll enjoy the video… To show your appreciation and to support Buzzpods, please subscribe, like and share the video. Also, stay tuned or even better, leave a comment down below if you’d like to see a full review of the QNAP TS-453 Pro 4bay NAS for the full specs and my final conclusion on this NAS.

Watch my video of the QNAP TS-453 Pro Unboxing on YouTube: