Qnap TS-432XeU review: A super-slim rack NAS at an equally small price

Space-poor SMBs will love Qnap's TS-432XeU as it's one of the smallest rackmount NAS appliances around. Its standard-width 1U chassis measures a mere 292mm deep, so it'll slip easily into a small wall box or a standard two-post data cabinet

Stepping up as a lower-cost alternative to Qnap's TS-435XeU, it employs the same super-slim chassis but drops the two internal M.2 NVMe SSD slots and supplants the 2.2GHz quad-core Marvell CN913X CPU with a 1.7GHz quad-core Annapurna Alpine chip. Networking is slightly diminished too, as it sports the same dual 2.5GbE multi-Gig ports but halves the 10GbE SFP+ port count to one.

The appliance presents four hot-swap LFF/SFF bays at the front, and it's possible to expand capacity outside the box. The rear USB-A 3.2 Gen 1 ports can be used to add up to two of Qnap's tower or rack expansion units, and we suggest the TR-004U model as this 4-bay 1U rack shelf is the same depth as the appliance.

Qnap TS-432XeU review: Build quality

The TS-435XeU is well built with a solid steel chassis and sturdy metal drive carriers. The appliance includes 4GB of DDR4 SODIMM memory, which can be expanded to 16GB – half that of the TS-435XeU.

As you'd expect with such a small chassis, there isn't a lot of room inside, but the memory slot is located on the top of the motherboard and easily accessible. As with the TS-435XeU, there's only one slot, so any upgrades will require the base memory to be ditched.

Three cooling fans are arranged across the rear panel, with one drawing air over the CPU's heatsink via a small plastic shroud. During testing, we found the appliance to be whisper-quiet, making it a great choice for small offices that value their tranquility.

Qnap TS-432XeU review: Deployment and limits

For testing, we fitted four 4TB Seagate IronWolf NAS-specific HDDs and used Qnap's Qfinder utility to discover the appliance on our lab network. It provided quick access to the web browser setup wizard, where we left it to load the latest QTS 5.2 OS.

Note that Qnap's QuTS OS is off the menu, as this is only supported on Intel- and AMD-powered appliances and not ARM-based ones. QTS is a more nimble OS that doesn't have such a high demand for memory and is designed for entry-level NAS appliances.

QuTS provides superior data protection features such as ZFS copy-on-write, end-to-end checksums, and WORM (write once read many) policies for NAS shares. However, its data deduplication feature will only be enabled when you have at least 16GB of memory.

There are also software limitations, as Qnap's ARM-based appliances can't run high-profile apps such as the Virtualization Station and Hyper Data Protector. That said, we counted 79 apps available for this appliance, which include key data protection apps.

Qnap TS-432XeU review: QTS data protection

We used the Storage & Snapshots app to create a RAID5 array which also offers facilities for running manual and scheduled snapshots of NAS shares and iSCSI LUNs. QTS can manage up to 256 snapshots, with a limit of 64 per volume or LUN and Qnap's snapshot technology supports standard EXT4 file systems, so it doesn't require you to choose between this and BTRFS when creating volumes.

The licence-free Hybrid Backup Sync 3 (HBS 3) app is designed to protect your NAS data, helps you create a 3-2-1 backup strategy in only four steps, and uses Storage Spaces to define multiple backup destinations. These can be local repositories on the appliance, remote locations such another Qnap NAS and Rsync, FTP or CIFS/SMB servers, and cloud storage with Qnap supporting no less than forty providers, including its own myQNAPcloud service.

HBS 3 can run data integrity checks when backups have completed to ensure they can be restored, and file version management provides extra protection against ransomware. HBS 3 also offers one-way and two-way syncing services between NAS source folders and destinations such as remote Rsync, FTP and CIFS/SMB servers or any supported cloud provider.

QTS can boost performance for cloud storage as the HybridMount app uses standard file protocols to mount storage from providers such as Amazon S3, Dropbox, OneDrive and Google Drive as NAS shares and assign a local cache to them. You get perpetual licences for two providers included with extra ones costing £15 per year.

Alternatively, you can use the VJBOD Cloud app to present cloud storage as local block-based NAS or iSCSI volumes. One perpetual provider licence is included, with more also costing £15 per year.

Qnap TS-432XeU review: 2.5GbE and 10GbE performance

With the appliance hooked up over 2.5GbE to our Zyxel XMG1930-30HP multi-Gig switch, we mapped a share to a Dell Windows Server 2025 host on the 10GbE LAN. Performance is good with Iometer reporting raw sequential read and write speeds of 2.3Gbits/sec and 2.2Gbits/sec.

Real world speeds were in the same ball park, with 25GB file copies between the server and appliance averaging read and write speeds of 2.3Gbits/sec and 2.1Gbits/sec. Our backup copy test using a 22.4GB folder with 10,500 small files delivered 1.1Gbits/sec.

We moved to 10GbE by connecting the appliance using a DAC (direct access cable) to the switch's 10GbE SFP+ port. Running Iometer on the share again returned sequential read and write rates of 8.6Gbits/sec and 5.6Gbits/sec. Our real world large file copy delivered sustained read and write speeds of 3.8Gbits/sec and 2.9Gbits/sec while our backup test averaged 1.7Gbits/sec.

Over 2.5GbE, the TS-432XeU matches the TS-435XeU, but Iometer NAS read and write speeds over 10GbE are down by 4.6% and 22%, respectively. Even so, that's nothing to be sniffed at and will easily be enough for the target market of small businesses.

Qnap TS-432XeU review: Is it worth it?

The TS-432XeU is an affordable choice for small businesses with it listed on LambdaTek for £617 excluding VAT. The ARM CPU does have some limitations but Qnap's QTS OS delivers plenty of data protection apps, performance over 2.5GbE and 10GbE is quite respectable, and its compact dimensions make it a great choice where office space is at a premium.

Qnap TS-432XeU specifications