Since its launch over nine years ago, Qnap's mighty 16-bay NAS cube still holds the record as the largest desktop storage appliance on the planet. On review, we have the latest TVS-AIh1688ATX, which targets AI apps such as image recognition and analysis, along with a range of enterprise tasks, including data backup and virtualization.

Starting life as the TS-1635, chassis design has generally remained the same but has seen many subsequent hardware upgrades as it's gone from a humble Amazon Alpine to an Intel Xeon W CPU in the TVS-h1688X. The TVS-AIh1688ATX takes performance to the next level as the top-end model we test sports a modern 24-core Intel Core Ultra 9 285 CPU teamed up with 48GB of DDR5 memory.

With eight P (performance) cores, sixteen E (efficient) cores, an embedded Intel Graphics GPU, and Intel AI Boost NPU (neural processor unit) to play with, the appliance boasts a high 36 TOPS (trillion operations per second). Typical AI-based applications Qnap is aiming the appliance at include its QuMagie photo album categorisation, along with the QVR surveillance app's facial recognition and enhanced people counting.

Qnap TVS-AIh1688ATX-U9-48G review: Hardware changes

Along with a hugely upgraded CPU, the appliance introduces significant updates in the storage department. The twelve main drive bays still support LFF and SFF SATA HDDs and SSDs, but the bank of four SFF bays can now handle U.2 NVMe Gen4 SSDs as well as SATA models.

One feature we're sad to see go is the dual internal M.2 NVMe SSD slots. Qnap recommends running its QuTS hero OS on SSDs for the best performance, and previously we've always used the M.2 slots for these duties as they free up the main storage bays. On a brighter note, Qnap has sensibly provided the 48GB of base DDR5 memory on one stick, so you can upgrade to the maximum 192GB without having to replace it.

Networking sees changes too, as although the 2.5GbE multi-Gig port count has been halved, the dual-port 10GbE adapter card in the TVS-h1688X has been replaced with two embedded ports. This matters as it frees up the inner PCIe x16 expansion slot, which supports 260mm full-length full-height cards – the two outer half-height slots have length restrictions of 150mm due to the positioning of the dual CPU blower fans in front of them.

The TVS-AIh1688ATX is blessed with a wealth of USB ports, as you have two USB-C 4, two USB-C 3.2 Gen2 plus three USB-A 3.2 Gen2, and you can add dual Thunderbolt 5 with Qnap's optional QXP-T52P PCIe card. The HDMI port has also been upgraded from 1.4b to 2.1, allowing it to support 4K video at 60Hz.

Qnap TVS-AIh1688ATX-U9-48G review: Deployment and 10GbE performance

Qnap doesn't enforce the same draconian drive restriction policies as Synology, and we had no problems using two 1TB Western Digital SA500 SATA SSDs for system pool duties, four 22TB Western Digital Red Pro NAS HDDs for general data storage, and a quartet of 3.84TB SanDisk U.2 NVMe SSDs for performance testing. Deployment is as simple as Qnap's QFinder Pro desktop app spotted the NAS on our network and transported us to the browser-based setup routine, which automatically installed the latest QuTS hero h6 OS – more on that later.

Using the Storage Manager app, we set the SATA SSDs up as a RAID1 mirror while the HDDs and NVMe SSDs were configured as RAID5 arrays. With a NAS share on the NVMe array mapped to a Dell PowerEdge Windows Server 2022 host over 10GbE, we watched Iometer report a splendid 9.3Gbits/sec across the board for sequential and random read and write operations.

It was the same story for IP SANs with a 1TB iSCSI target delivering identical speeds across all tests. We ramped up the pressure with a dual 10GbE MPIO link to the target and saw sequential read and write speeds increase to 18.5Gbits/sec and 17.4Gbits/sec while random operations returned an equally impressive 18.5Gbits/sec and 16.7Gbits/sec. We also noted that the Intel CPU never went about 24% utilization during our test, so there's plenty left in the tank for more demanding tasks.

Qnap TVS-AIh1688ATX-U9-48G review: QuTS hero h6 new features

The latest QuTS hero h6 has a sharp focus on security and the TVS-AIh1688ATX is currently the only Qnap NAS that supports the new Secure Boot feature. Implemented at the hardware level, it verifies the appliance's firmware signature and prevents it from loading if it's been compromised.

There's support for FIDO2 passkeys for secure password-free logins and the new KMIP (key management interoperability protocol) app connects with remote KMIP servers for managing, storing and retrieving storage encryption keys. Other security features on the horizon are the Ransomware Guard which is accessed from the Malware Remover app, detects known malware and monitors processes for suspicious activity while the Secure IP Access feature will augment the QuFirewall app with granular IP-based access controls.

The High Availability Manager app allows two identical appliances to be placed in a fault tolerant active/passive cluster and has been updated with support for more Qnap NAS models. The Control Panel, iSCSI & Fibre Channel and Storage Manager apps see substantially redesigned interfaces making them even easier to use. Snapshot management gets its own dedicated app which adds extra ransomware protection with policies for creating immutable snapshots that cannot be tampered with or deleted until the retention period you set has expired.

Previously, Qnap's Qtier app was only available with its QTS OS but this has now been integrated into QuTS hero. This manages up to three storage tiers comprising NVMe SSDs, SATA SSDs and HDDs, monitors storage pool activity and applies custom schedules to control the migration of hot data across the tiers.

Qnap TVS-AIh1688ATX-U9-48G review: Is it worth it?

With Qnap's UK online store listing it for £5,660 including VAT, the TVS-AIh1688ATX-U9-48G represents a considerable investment but does deliver an impressive hardware package for the price. Qnap also offers the lower-end TVS-AIh1688ATX-U7-32G, which comes with a 20-core Intel Core Ultra 7 CPU plus 32GB of DDR5 and costs £4,464.

Its powerful CPU is clearly capable of handling a wide range of surveillance tasks, and we were impressed with Qnap's QVR Face Insight and QVR Human apps as they worked extremely well with fast reactions to activity in our predefined camera detection zones. The QuMagie app also delivered efficient categorisation, face recognition, and thumbnail generation for our big photo collections.

For surveillance operations, the appliance has almost no competition as Synology's current AI-powered NVR alternatives have dwindled to its entry-level 2-bay DVA1622. The high storage bay count and feature-rich QuTS hero h6 OS also make the TVS-AIh1688ATX appliances great all-rounders that look capable of handling a wide range of enterprise data protection, backup, and general storage duties.

Qnap TVS-AIh1688ATX-U9-48G specifications

Qnap continues to make inroads into the enterprise storage market as the TS-h2477AXU-RP NAS appliance offers a powerful rack-mount package with an impressively large capacity. Stepping up as the new flagship model in Qnap's TS-hx77AXU-RP rackmount family, it also has a keen focus on value and is a lower-cost alternative to Qnap's 30-bay TS-h3087XU-RP hybrid appliance.

Powered by a speedy 3.5GHz 8-core AMD Ryzen 7 7700 CPU and up to 192GB of DDR5 memory, the 4U chassis sports 24 hot-plug LFF/SFF drive bays along with dual internal M.2 PCIe Gen5 slots for NVMe SSDs. True, you don't get the extra rear SFF bays offered by the TS-hx87XU-RP range, but the TS-h2477AXU-RP has big expansion plans as it can handle eight of Qnap's 24-bay 4U TL-R2400PES-RP JBOD shelves for a total of 216 drives and up to 5PB of raw storage.

Networking options are plentiful as the appliance presents dual embedded 2.5GbE and 10GbE RJ45 ports, which are all the multi-Gigabit variety. Three spare PCIe Gen4 expansion slots mean there's plenty of room for more, and Qnap offers a wide choice of its own certified 2.5GbE, 10GbE, and 25GbE network adapters.

Qnap TS-h2477AXU-RP review: Design and deployment

The appliance is clothed in a sturdy steel chassis with solid metal drive carriers, and the price includes dual 800W hot-plug PSUs. Popping the lid reveals the motherboard lurking in the base, and closer inspection shows it is the same as that used by Qnap's TS-h3077AFU all-Flash array, but with the two rear SSD cages removed and the dual M.2 NVMe SSD slots added.

The Ryzen CPU is mounted by a large passive heatsink, and cooling is handled by a bank of four cold-swap fans mounted behind the drive backplane. Four long DIMM slots sit to the right, with one occupied by the base 32GB of memory, leaving room to upgrade to 128GB without having to replace it.

The 'h' in the model name clearly shows the preferred operating system is Qnap's QuTS Hero – you can load the nimbler QTS software during the installation phase, but you'll be missing out on a wealth of data protection and storage reduction features. QuTS hero offers end-to-end checksums for transparent data corruption recovery, triple parity RAID and triple mirroring, WORM (write once read many) policies to protect NAS shares from tampering, and inline data deduplication, which requires a minimum of 16GB to function.

Qnap doesn't enforce the same drive restriction policies as Synology, and we had no problems using two Kingston 480GB NVMe SSDs for system pool duties and four 22TB Western Digital Red Pro NAS HDDs for general data storage. The web-based deployment wizard installs QuTS hero, and we then use the Storage & Snapshots app to create a mirrored array for the system pool and a big RAID5 array for our data.

Qnap TS-h2477AXU-RP review: Data protection

QuTS hero offers ZFS copy-on-write for fast, almost unlimited snapshots of NAS shares and iSCSI LUNs, which can be scheduled to run as often as every minute for near-continuous protection. NAS shares and iSCSI LUNs can be encrypted, and the SnapSync app provides fast replication to remote appliances using scheduled and real-time block-level snapshots.

When creating NAS shares, you can opt to apply one of two WORM policies to protect them from ransomware attacks, and once assigned, they cannot be modified or disabled. The Enterprise policy allows a protected folder to be deleted, but stops anything in it from being individually modified or removed, while the stronger Compliance policy blocks folder deletion and only allows it to be removed by deleting the entire storage pool.

There are plenty of free backup apps available with the Hybrid Backup Sync (HBS) 3, managing 3-2-1 protection strategies and securing local appliance data to remote NAS appliances or cloud providers, including Qnap's myQNAPcloud service. The Hyper Data Protector (HDP) app secures VMware and Hyper-V virtualized environments, presents a dedicated management web console, and can run block-level backups of Windows PCs and servers that have Qnap's free NetBak PC agent installed.

During testing, we updated the appliance with the latest QuTS hero 5.3, which introduces plenty of new features, including a high availability manager that allows two identical appliances to be placed in a fault-tolerant active/passive cluster. The Control Panel, iSCSI & Fibre Channel, and Storage Manager apps see completely redesigned interfaces, while snapshot management has been moved to a dedicated app, which offers protection policies for creating immutable snapshots.

Qnap TS-h2477AXU-RP review: 10GbE performance

For performance testing, we used the appliance's embedded 10GbE ports and hooked it up to the lab's Dell PowerEdge R760xs Xeon Scalable Windows Server 2022 host. With a NAS share mapped to the server, we recorded Iometer sequential read and write rates both of 9.2Gbits/sec, and swapping to random operations returned 9.2Gbits/sec and 9.1Gbits/sec.

IP SAN speeds are equally good, with a 1TB target delivering the same sequential and random rates as our NAS share. We increased the pressure with a dual 10GbE MPIO link to the target and watched sequential read and write speeds increase to 18.5Gbits/sec and 17.4Gbits/sec.

Swapping to random read and write operations delivered 18.3Gbit/sec and 16.5Gbits/sec, and we noted for the latter test, the Ryzen CPU never went beyond 17% utilization. These numbers also highlight the efficiency of the QuTS hero ZFS ARC (adaptive read cache) and ZIL (ZFS intent log) as they negate the need for SSD caches to improve random operations.

Qnap TS-h2477AXU-RP review: Is it worth it?

Yes, it is, with Broadbandbuyer confirming to us an end-user price for a diskless model of £6,635 excluding VAT. Qnap's 16-bay TS-h1677AXU-RP model comes in £5,378, so the TS-h2477AXU-RP offers a lower cost per drive bay.

The TS-h2477AXU-RP is a great choice for businesses with big capacity demands, as it offers a huge storage potential, and Qnap's lack of drive restrictions means you can shop around for your storage media. The appliance performed very well in our 10GbE lab test,s and the latest QuTS hero software is packed with plenty of business apps and smart data protection features.

Qnap TS-h2477AXU-RP specifications

Aimed firmly at content creators, media professionals, and small studios, Qnap's TBS-h574TX NASbook offers them a very particular set of skills. This diminutive desktop NAS appliance delivers an impressive hardware package with its pair of Thunderbolt 4 ports adding plenty of appeal to those engaged in 4K video production projects.

There are some surprises in the storage department as this all-Flash desktop NAS is the first we've seen to support EDSFF (Enterprise and Datacenter Standard Form Factor) E1.S drives. It offers five hot-plug bays across the front and Qnap has all the angles covered as the standard hot-plug carriers come with M.2 2280 adapters already fitted.

It's a powerful little box that's available with a choice of Intel's Gen13 Core i3 or Core i5 CPUs. We have the higher-end model on review which employs a 1.8GHz 12-core Core i5-1340PE CPU sporting four Performance cores with HyperThreading, eight Efficient cores, and an integrated Intel Iris Xe Graphics GPU.

Our appliance came with 16GB of non-upgradeable DDR4 memory while the Core i3 version gets 12GB. Bear in mind that Qnap's QuTS hero operating system (OS) is quite memory-hungry and if you opt for the cheaper version, you won't be able to use its integral data deduplication feature as this requires a minimum of 16GB.

Qnap TBS-h574TX review: Design and hardware

The TBS-h574TX looks good on the desktop as it's encased in a sleek and solid aluminum case with a posh gold Qnap logo on the upper surface. Weighing in at 2.24kgs unpopulated, it's easy enough to transport and the external power supply is pleasingly small as well.

The drive carriers are accessed from behind a magnetic front grill which has a small locking tab to one side. No tools are required to fit M.2 SSDs as you slot them in and let the retaining tab snap back to secure them but there's work to be done for EDSFF E1.S drives.

It depends on the type you choose as for 5.9mm high SSDs, you replace the M.2 adapter with the drive while the thicker 9.5mm and 15mm models dispense with the carrier and are screwed directly to the front locking assembly. Note that you won't see the full performance benefits of PCIe Gen4 NVMe SSDs as the appliance's slots are only the PCIe Gen3 x2 variety. Qnap recommends putting its heatsinks on them which are not included and we suggest you use them as during our performance tests, the two rear system fans ramped up and became quite intrusive.

You'll find Thunderbolt 4 ports fore and aft along with a choice of USB 3.2 and USB 2 ports. The rear panel offers an HDMI 1.4b port for piping 4K 30Hz video out from the GPU and network connections are plentiful as you have 2.5GbE and 10GbE RJ-45 with both the multi-Gigabit variety.

Qnap TBS-h574TX review: QuTS hero features

For testing, we fitted 480GB Kingston M.2 NVMe SSDs in the first two bays for use as a mirrored system pool and added two more 800GB M.2 NVMe SSDs for general data storage. Installation is a breeze as the web-based wizard disabled the default admin account, insisted we create a new one, and then proceeded to load the OS.

You can install Qnap's more nimble QTS software but QuTS hero offers a lot more features including stronger data protection features. ZFS copy-on-write delivers near unlimited NAS and iSCSI LUN snapshots along with inline data deduplication, compression, and end-to-end checksums that handle the self-healing of data corruption.

Although not so relevant in a five-bay appliance, RAID options are more extensive and you can opt for triple parity RAID to protect against three drive failures or triple mirroring which stores identical copies of data on three drives. And if you don't want your NAS data tampered with, QuTS hero offers a choice of two WORM (write once read many) policies that can be applied during share creation.

The Thunderbolt 4 ports support peer-to-peer connections up to 20Gbps with Mac and Windows hosts. Managed from the Network & Virtual Switch app, they also support directly connected external USB storage devices which automatically appear as network shares for authorized users.

Qnap TBS-h574TX review: 10GbE performance

As a NAS appliance, the TBS-h574TX has a very good turn of speed over 10GbE. With a share on the 800GB mirrored SSDs mapped over 10GbE to a Dell Windows Server 2022 host, we recorded top Iometer sequential read and write rates of 9.3Gbits/sec and 9.1Gbits/sec and swapping over to random operations returned precisely the same speeds.

These numbers highlight an important feature of the QuTS hero OS as its ARC (adaptive read cache) and ZIL (ZFS intent log) features are already very efficient making SSD caches unnecessary. Real-world speeds are just as good with a large 25GB test file copied between the NAS and server returning average read and write rates both of 9.1Gbits/sec.  

If you want the appliance to present IP SANs, you won't be disappointed as a 250GB iSCSI target mapped to the server over 10GbE delivered sequential and random read and write rates identical to the NAS share. The Core i5 CPU has a lot of horsepower on tap as during all our tests, utilisation never exceeded 9% so there's clearly plenty of bandwidth available for Thunderbolt 4 activities.

Qnap TBS-h574TX review: Is it worth it?

The TBS-h574TX NASbook is in a league of its own as no other vendor offers integrated support for EDSFF E1.S and M.2 SSDs along with dual Thunderbolt 4 ports. More system memory would have been nice but that said, it packs an impressive hardware package into a compact and very well-designed desktop chassis. With the higher-end model on review costing a shade under £1,500 excluding VAT, it's an affordable choice for content creators who want high-speed direct access to large video files.

Qnap TBS-h574TX specifications

Most NAS devices stay around for a couple of years before they're updated with a newer model. While that's fine for consumers, it's less ideal for businesses, who may want the reassurance that a key bit of kit will be viable – and available – for longer. The QNAP TS-253E addresses this as it's a two-bay NAS enclosure that will be sold and supported until 2029.

This NAS is aimed at small businesses and the small branch or home offices of larger organizations. It's specced well enough for the role, with two 3.5" SATA bays, and two slots for NVMe SSDs. Inserted flash memory can be used either as a separate fast storage volume, as a cache for the disks, or for a mixture of both.

The TS-253E is set up to fill a wide range of roles, and its port selection underlines the point. Core functions are covered by its dual 2.5GbE sockets, along with front and back USB 3.2 Gen2 ports for expansion. However, the presence of two USB 2.0 and two 4K 30FPS HDMI ports means you could also use the TS-253E as a surveillance center or multimedia center.

That said, this isn't a high-powered editing station. Despite hardware decoding and transcoding of H.264 video, this NAS' Intel Celeron J6412 processor is likely to prove limiting for intensive operations. It's paired with 8GB of RAM and oddly, despite a spare slot on our review model, that's the maximum supported.

While this NAS doesn't have an eSATA expansion port, you can attach various expansion enclosures using one or both of its USB 3.2 slots. QNAP's JBOD options include an eight-bay desktop enclosure, and a 12-bay rackmount, although you can only connect one of either type. Alternatively, there's a choice of two and four-bay RAID enclosures – you can connect a maximum of two.

QNAP TS-253E review: Set up

There's not much to the physical setup of this NAS. Inserting a pair of 3.5" SATA drives is as simple as removing the caddies and their snap locks, lining up the disks, then refitting the locks and caddies. You'll need the supplied screws to fit 2.5" disks, but it's still an easy job.

One slight frustration is that in common with most compact NAS enclosures, you'll need to take the outer cover off to get at the TS-253E's NVMe slots. That's unlikely to be much of an issue if you're only installing one device, but it could become a chore if you're rolling several out. Rather than clipping in, NVMes are secured with two small screws.

Two-bay NAS enclosures are ideal as a compact and simple choice, but they do have some limitations. Chief among these is the fact RAID 1 is the only sensible drive configuration, so you lose half of the disk space to data redundancy. Creating a large volume can be more expensive, too. As an example, at the time of writing, building a 12TB RAID 5 array with four, 4TB disks would cost about £260, while the two-disk RAID 1 equivalent would be £340, and probably slower. With this in mind, it's worth mentioning that for another £130 or so there's also the QNAP TS-453E, which is essentially a four-bay version of this NAS.

We configured the TS-253E with two 1TB Western Digital Black NVMe SSDs and two 4TB Synology NAS disks. It was easy to find the NAS from a PC using the Qfinder Pro, then connect and install QNAP's QTS operating system. However, while the initial installation is simple, things quickly get a bit more complicated when setting up the storage volume.

Unusually, QTS offers a choice between a static volume on a standard RAID group, or either thin or thick volumes created on a storage pool. Pools can be set with encryption if you're using self-encrypting drives (SEDs), or use QNAP's Qtier feature which automatically moves frequently accessed data to faster drives, and vice-versa. It's a powerful set of options, offering benefits such as more flexible space management, but it can be confusing – or plain overkill for more basic applications.

We formatted with the Btrfs file system – although EXT4 is an option – then started our tests with preconfigured space on a thick volume. We then repeated our benchmarks with a more traditional configuration, creating RAID 1 arrays across two disks.

QNAP TS-253E review: Features and apps

QTS may not be the most user-friendly operating system for a small business NAS, but it is certainly one of the best. Aside from its comprehensive disk management, you can use built-in features to configure the TS-253E as, for example, a DHCP server or Domain Controller.

There's much more available through QNAP's App Center, which at the time of writing offered 107 compatible apps. These included a wide range of backup software, from the powerful Hybrid Backup Sync, through to Boxafe – which lets you backup the data from cloud services such as Google Workspace. Alongside QNAP's useful Download Station, there was a choice of SQL servers, Python installs, and PHP utilities, and Virtualization Station, supporting various VM and virtual server scenarios.

QNAP provides several apps to help you turn the TS-253E into a surveillance station. These include QVR Center, which acts as a surveillance console, but also tools such as QVR Face Insight, which offers real-time facial recognition, and QVR DoorAccess, which helps you implement access control management.

If you're more interested in using this NAS as a workstation, HybridDesk Station installs a suite of apps offering web browsing, multimedia playback, and even covering video calls via Skype. While it's hardly a substitute for a powerful PC, this could let you use the TS-253E as a simple computer for presentations, or in a meeting room.

QNAP TS-253E review: Performance

We tested this NAS' performance across two different hard disk sets, both with and without SSD caching. We also benchmarked a flash volume created from two NVMe SSDs. The TS-253E performed particularly well in the PCMark10 Data Drive benchmark, scoring 584 for an un-cached disk volume, and 590 when retested on SSD storage – those are the fastest figures we've recorded in this class.

The TS-253E was less remarkable in ATTO Disk Benchmark, but it still performed well – comfortably outpacing rival NASs with gigabit Ethernet connections. Tested for 2MB file operations, it could read data at 283MB/sec, the maximum possible over 2.5GbE. Its 223MB/sec disk write speed wasn't the fastest we've seen, but it stretched this to 248MB/sec when writing to an SSD volume.

We verify benchmark performance by copying a large set of files to and from a NAS. The TS-253E had no problem sustaining 283MB/sec when moving a single 8GB file, although as we'd expect it was slower to copy the entire batch, which contains 10,000 much smaller files. Even so, we recorded a creditable 64MB/sec read/write average for disk storage, and an impressive 74MB/sec when repeating the test with flash storage.

QNAP TS-253E review: Is it worth it?

This is an excellent NAS, offering a good mix of performance, features, and upgradability. It's well suited to use as a surveillance center but equally would do a great job handling storage and other services in a moderately busy small office. This NAS' long-term support and availability make it a suitable candidate for rolling out to multiple retail, branch, or other locations. While it's not the most powerful device, its support for SSD caching and storage extenders could help it keep pace if things get a little busier than you expected.

QNAP TS-253E specifications 

Qnap has been steadily making inroads into the enterprise all-Flash array (AFA) market and the Qnap TS-h3077AFU offers budget-conscious businesses an SSD-dense solution at a price they can afford. To keep the base price on the right side of £5K, the appliance supports lower-cost SATA SSDs but the smart combination of front and rear cages allows it to present an impressive 30 SFF bays in only 2U of rack space

The chassis bears many similarities to Qnap's older Xeon W-1200 equipped TS-h3088XU-RP as it also has 24 front SFF bays and six more at the back split into two groups. It's a very different story inside though, as the TS-h3077AFU is available with a 6-core AMD Ryzen 5 7000 CPU or as with our review system, an 8-core 3.8GHz Ryzen 7 7745 with a 5.3GHz boost speed.

Memory sees big improvements as you have a choice of 32GB or 64GB of fast DDR5 and this can be upgraded to a very usable 192GB using 48GB UDIMMs. Network options look good as the appliance presents dual embedded 2.5GbE and 10GbE RJ45 ports which are all the multi-Gigabit variety. 

There's plenty of room for more as three vacant PCIe Gen4 expansion slots are available and Qnap offers a good choice of 2.5, 10, 25, and 100GbE cards. Alternatively, you can use them with Qnap's expansion cards and attach up to eight external disk shelves with the 24-bay TL-R2400PES-RP adding a maximum of 192 extra drives.

Qnap TS-h3077AFU review: Hardware and design

Internally, it's all nice and tidy with the Ryzen CPU mounted by an impressively large passive heatsink. Four long DIMM slots sit to the right with two occupied by 32GB DDR5 UDIMM modules leaving room to upgrade to 128GB without having to replace them.

Cable clutter is kept to a minimum as the two rear triple-bay cages are connected directly to edge connectors on the motherboard. Internal cooling is handled by four cold-swap fans fitted in a removable tray positioned behind the drive backplane and three small air shrouds are used to direct air through the rear cages plus the centrally mounted CPU. 

Qnap TS-h3077AFU review: 25GbE performance

For 25GbE performance testing, we fitted a Qnap dual-port 25GbE card in the appliance and another in a Dell PowerEdge R650xs Xeon Scalable rack server running Windows Server 2022. Over at the appliance, we created a RAID10 data pool from the WD Red SSDs and mapped a NAS share to the server over a 1-meter SFP28 DAC (direct attach cable).

NAS performance is excellent with the share returning Iometer sequential read and write rates of 23.1Gbits/sec and 22.6Gbits/sec while random operations delivered rates of 23.1Gbits/sec and 22.7Gbits/sec. To test IP SAN performance, we created a 500GB iSCSI LUN and mapped it to the server over a single 25GbE connection. Our test results were almost identical to the NAS speeds with only random write rates dropping very slightly to 22.4Gbits/sec.

We ramped up the pressure with a dual 25GbE MPIO link to the target and saw IP SAN performance almost double across the board. Iometer reported raw sequential read and write rates of 46.2Gbits/sec and 46Gbits/sec while random operations returned 46.1Gbits/sec and 40.8Gbits/sec. 

Swapping to 4KB block sizes saw good I/O throughput as after leaving each test running for an hour, we recorded sequential read and write throughputs of 266,900 and 257,500 IOPS. Changing to random operations returned read and write rates of 266,200 and 148,100 IOPS. 

Qnap TS-h3077AFU review: QuTS hero features

The 'h' in the model indicates that this appliance is geared up for Qnap's QuTS hero OS. It comes with a large amount of base memory for good reason as the OS requires at least 16GB for its inline data deduplication feature and 32GB to get the best performance from 10GbE and faster connections.

It offers far more data integrity features than the more nimble QTS OS with its ZFS copy-on-write offering fast, almost unlimited snapshots of NAS shares and iSCSI LUNs and options to encrypt both NAS shares and iSCSI LUNs. End-to-end checksums provide self-healing of data corruption and you have triple parity RAID to protect against three drive failures or triple mirroring which stores identical copies of data on three drives.

Ransomware protection comes into play with NAS shares as you can apply one of two WORM (write once, read many) policies. These protect shared folders from malicious or accidental deletion and stop the data within them being modified or removed.

Choose RAID5, 6, 50, 60, or Triple-Parity arrays and Qnap's patented QSAL (Qnap SSD antiwear leveling) comes into play. This sets different levels of over-provisioning on each SSD in the array to avoid multiple device failures occurring simultaneously.

Qnap TS-h3077AFU review: Is it worth it?

Absolutely – a price tag of around £5,500 for the TS-h3077AFU-R7-64G model we have on review makes it exceedingly good value. It's in a league of its own too, as no other vendor offers a 2U 30-bay all-Flash array and it comes with a powerful hardware specification, a very high memory capacity, and plenty of room for further expansion. 

The appliance may only support SATA SSDs but we found NAS and IP SAN performance over 25GbE to be up there with more costly alternatives. And with Qnap's QuTS hero OS at the helm, it won't be found wanting for enterprise-class data protection and storage-saving features. 

Qnap TS-h3077AFU specifications

Qnap moves deeper into enterprise territory with the launch of two rack appliances that aim to offer a tempting combination of storage features, performance, and capacity. There's certainly plenty of power on tap with the top-dog TS-h1677AXU-RP on review sporting an 8-core 3.8GHz AMD Ryzen 7 7700 CPU teamed up with speedy DDR5 memory.

The appliance presents sixteen hot-swap LFF/SFF drive bays at the front and inside you'll find a pair of M.2 2280 PCIe Gen5 slots for NVMe SSDs. Capacity expansion is excellent as Qnap offers a wide range of JBOD enclosures – the TS-h1677AXU-RP supports up to eight 24-bay 4U TL-R2400PES-RP shelves for a total of 208 drives and over 4PB of storage.

Networking looks good as the appliance presents dual embedded 2.5GbE and 10GbE RJ45 ports which are all the multi-Gigabit variety. There's room for more as you have three spare PCIe Gen4 expansion slots and Qnap offers a good choice of 2.5, 10, 25, and 100GbE cards.

Qnap TS-h1677AXU-RP review: Software choices

The 'h' in the model name clearly shows which operating system (OS) Qnap is aiming this appliance at, but you do have the option of loading QTS as well. Before jumping in though, bear in mind there are a lot of differences between them and you can only swap from one to the other after backing up your data and reinitializing the appliance. 

QTS is best for SMBs that want simplified data protection features as it supports manual and scheduled snapshots on EXT4 volumes. Its snapshot service only requires a minimum of 1GB of memory, the maximum 4TB SSD cache size needs 16GB of system memory and QTS supports the Qtier 2 data migration feature.

The ZFS-based QuTS hero will be the preferred choice for most enterprises as it offers far more data integrity and storage reduction features. End-to-end checksums provide transparent data corruption recovery, it supports triple parity RAID and triple mirroring, big storage savings can be made with in-line data deduplication plus compression, and WORM (write once read many) policies can be applied to NAS shares to protect their data from tampering or accidental deletion.

There's good reason why the appliance comes with a base 32GB of memory as QuTS is more demanding in this department. It needs at least 16GB for its inline data deduplication feature, 32GB to get the best performance from 10GbE connections, and this much as well for SSD cache sizes up to 1TB.

Qnap TS-h1677AXU-RP review: 25GbE performance

We opted to test over 25GbE and installed a Qnap QXG-25G2SF-CX4 dual-port 25GbE adapter in the appliance and fitted another in the lab's Dell PowerEdge R650xs Xeon Scalable rack server running Windows Server 2022. During installation, we chose QuTS hero from the web-based wizard and used dual mirrored NVMe SSDs as a system pool and four 22TB Western Digital Red Pro HDDs in a RAID5 array for data storage.

NAS performance is excellent with a mapped share returning Iometer sequential read and write rates of 23.1Gbits/sec and 23Gbits. Swapping over to random operations saw equally impressive read and write speeds of 23.1Gbits/sec and 22.5Gbits/sec. 

IP SAN performance was very similar with a 1TB iSCSI target delivering 23.1Gbits/sec and 23Gbits/sec sequential read and write rates and 23.1Gbits/sec and 22.5Gbits/sec for random operations. Upping the pressure with a dual 25GbE MPIO link, Iometer reported sequential and random read and write speeds of 46.2Gbits/sec and 42.1Gbits/sec and 46.2Gbits/sec and 37.5Gbits/sec respectively.

The results from our NAS and IP SAN Iometer random tests clearly show how efficient the QuTS hero ZFS ARC (adaptive read cache) and ZIL (ZFS intent log) are. Essentially, you don't need to waste any storage bays on SSD caches as you're unlikely to see any significant improvements over these numbers.

Qnap TS-h1677AXU-RP review: Data protection features

There are no compromises on data integrity as QuTS hero offers ZFS copy-on-write for fast, almost unlimited snapshots of NAS shares and iSCSI LUNs which can be scheduled to run as often as every minute for near-continuous protection. Both NAS shares and iSCSI LUNs can now be encrypted and the SnapSync app provides fast, bandwidth-light replication to remote appliances using scheduled and real-time block-level snapshots.

WORM offers valuable ransomware protection and once enabled during NAS folder creation, it cannot be modified or disabled. The Enterprise policy allows a protected folder to be deleted but stops anything in it from being individually modified or removed while the stronger Compliance policy blocks folder deletion and only allows it to be removed by deleting the entire storage pool.

Backup apps are in abundance with Hybrid Backup Sync (HBS) 3 managing 3-2-1 protection strategies and securing local appliance data to cloud providers or remote NAS appliances for off-site storage. The Hyper Data Protector (HDP) app supports VMware and Hyper-V virtualized environments, presents a dedicated web console for VM backup and restore tasks, and can now remotely protect PCs and servers with Qnap's free NetBak agent loaded on them.

More security features are available as along with the Antivirus, Malware Remover, and QuFirewall apps, Qnap's Security Counselor uses predefined scan policies to search for and draw your attention to vulnerabilities. The appliance has enough power to host virtual machines and the Container Station, Ubuntu Linux Station, and Virtualization Station apps are all available for QuTS hero. 

Qnap TS-h1677AXU-RP review: Is it worth it?

The TS-h1677AXU-RP is comparatively good value as its starting price of around £4,314 delivers a powerful NAS package driven by a fast AMD Ryzen 7 7700 CPU and DDR5 memory. To put this in perspective, Synology's 16-bay RS4021xs+ costs a shade over £4,000 and this only gets you an elderly Xeon D-1541 CPU and 16GB of DDR4 memory.

Along with an impressive storage potential, the TS-h1677AXU-RP has no restrictions on HDDs and SSDs as Qnap's compatibility list has all the main manufacturers on it. The appliance delivered great results in our 25GbE NAS and IP SAN performance tests and Qnap's QuTS hero OS provides an excellent range of data integrity and protection features.

Qnap TS-h1677AXU-RP specifications

Content creators seeking a powerful storage system for their video masterpieces may find Qnap's TVS-h874T could be just the ticket. Proudly claimed by Qnap as the world's first Thunderbolt 4 NAS, this 8-bay desktop box sports a pair of these 40Gbits/sec ports for those who want fast access for 4K video production.

There's plenty of power to hand as Qnap offers a choice of Intel's Gen12 Core i7 or Core i9 CPUs. We have the cheaper option on review which sports a 12-core Core i7-12700E CPU offering eight 2.1GHz Performance cores, four 1.6GHz Efficient cores, and an integrated Intel UHD Graphics 770 GPU.

The appliance comes with 32GB of DDR4 memory upgradeable to 64GB – an important feature as the 'h' in the model name indicates Qnap is aiming this NAS primarily at its QuTS hero OS. This is more demanding than Qnap's QTS as it requires at least 16GB for its inline data deduplication feature and 32GB to get the best performance from 10GbE upgrades.

Qnap TVS-h874T review: Hardware features

The appliance is encased in a sturdy steel chassis with solid plastic lockable tool-free drive carriers and removing the metal lid reveals a tidy interior with Qnap's QXP-T42P Thunderbolt 4 card fitted in the lower of the two PCIe slots. Space is limited here as accessing the upper X16 slot requires an L-shaped screwdriver, otherwise the power supply will have to be removed to gain access to its bracket screw. 

The motherboard sits in the right side of the chassis with the CPU fitted with a large finned passive heatsink and partnered by a small cooling fan further back. General chassis cooling is handled by two 12cms diameter rear fans and during testing, we were impressed with how quiet the appliance was making it a great choice for small offices and home workers.

The 32GB of base memory is supplied as two 16GB DDR4 SO-DIMM modules so any upgrades will require one or both of them to be replaced and for reasons that escape us, Qnap has placed warranty stickers over the edge of each stick stating it will be voided if they are removed. Below the memory modules is a pair of easily accessible M.2 2280 NVMe SSD slots and these are the PCIe Gen 4 variety.

Qnap TVS-h874T review: 10GbE NAS and IP SAN performance

We fitted a pair of Kingston 480GB M.2 NVMe SSDs and after following the web console's wizard to install QuTS hero, we used them as a mirrored array for the initial system pool. For general data storage, we fitted a quartet of 22TB Western Digital Red Pro NAS drives and used the Storage & Snapshots app to create a big 58TB RAID5 pool. 

For our 10GbE performance tests, we installed a dual-port 10GbE SFP+ fibre adapter in the appliance and called up the lab's HPE ProLiant DL380 Gen11 rack server for host duties. This was equipped with dual 32-core 2.1GHz Xeon Scalable Gold 6430 CPUs, 256GB of DDR5 memory plus a dual-port 10GbE SFP+ adapter and running Windows Server 2022. 

With a NAS share on the RAID5 array mapped over 10GbE to the server, we recorded top Iometer sequential read and write rates of 9.3 and 9.2Gbits/sec, and swapping over to random operations returned very similar results. These numbers highlight an important feature of QuTS hero as its ZFS file system's ARC (adaptive read cache) and ZIL (ZFS intent log) features are already very efficient making SSD caches unnecessary. 

Moving over to IP SANs delivered equally impressive results with a 1TB target recording high sequential and random read and write rates of between 9.3Gbits/sec and 9.1Gbits/sec. We ramped up the pressure with a dual-10GbE MPIO link to the target and watched Iometer sequential and random read rates increase to 18.2Gbits/sec and 17.8Gbits/sec with write operations settling at 18Gbits/sec and 17.7Gbits/sec respectively.

I/O throughput for the MPIO iSCSI connection was also excellent. Dropping to Iometer 4KB block sizes delivered sequential read and write rates of 210,700 and 206,800 IOPS and changing to random operations saw read and write throughputs of 202,300 and 162,600 IOPS. We noted during all our tests that the QuTS resource monitor showed CPU utilization never going above 12 per cent so we can't see it having any problems delivering Thunderbolt 4 speeds

Qnap TVS-h874T review: QuTS hero features

QuTS hero offers superior data protection features to QTS with its ZFS copy-on-write delivering near unlimited NAS and iSCSI LUN snapshots along with inline data deduplication and compression. End-to-end checksums handle self-healing of data corruption while the SnapSync app provides fast snapshot backups to remote QuTS appliances using block-level replication run to a schedule or in real-time. 

Along with the standard RAID arrays, you can also opt for triple parity RAID to protect against three drive failures or triple mirroring which stores identical copies of data on three drives. A choice of two WORM (write once read many) policies can also be applied to NAS shares during creation to protect their data from tampering or accidental deletion.

App choices for both OSes are equally impressive and include key backup utilities such as Hybrid Backup Sync (HBS) 3 which helps create a 3-2-1 appliance protection strategy and now supports the new myQNAPcloud hosted storage. Virtualization is on the menu with the Container Station, Ubuntu Linux Station, and Virtualization Station apps all present while Hyper Data Protector keeps your VMware and Hyper-V VMs safe by backing them up regularly.

Qnap TVS-h874T review: Is it worth it?

With the model on review costing around £2,700 excluding VAT, the TVS-h874T represents a considerable investment but its powerful Core i7-12700E CPU provides a good return as performance is extremely good. The appliance's high memory capacity makes it a perfect platform for Qnap's QuTS hero OS which offers a wealth of enterprise-class data protection features and it's a good choice for video editors that want super-fast Thunderbolt 4 ports and plenty of storage potential. 

Qnap TVS-h874T specifications

The Qnap TS-855eU-RP aims to show that good things come in small packages as it squeezes eight 3.5in SATA drive bays into a chassis that's only 297mm deep. This makes it one of the shortest 2U rack NAS devices on the market and makes it ideal for slotting into a small wall box or a two-post rack cabinet.

The appliance is powered by a reasonably modern 2.8GHz 8-core Intel Atom C5125 processor, and the base 8GB of DDR4 RAM can be upgraded to 64GB. Dual 2.5GbE ports are provided along with a pair of PCI-E expansion slots and, even though the motherboard is barely 12cm deep, Qnap has found room to add a couple of M.2 NVMe slots.

The lack of an "H" in the model name indicates that Qnap is aiming the Qnap TS-855eU-RP primarily at businesses that prefer its more nimble QTS operating system. The setup wizard offers an option to install QuTS hero, but that's a lot more memory-hungry so you'll need to upgrade the memory to at least 16GB to get the best out of it.

Qnap TS-855eU-RP review: Performance

For testing, we decided to go with QuTS and used dual mirrored 480GB Kingston M.2 NVMe SSDs as a fast system pool. For data storage, we fitted four 20TB Western Digital DC HC560 hard disks, although when we configured them as a 53TB RAID5 array, QuTS complained about insufficient memory so we upgraded this to 16GB.

If data integrity and protection are top priorities then QuTS is your best bet as it offers a lot more features than QTS. These include end-to-end checksums, ZFS copy-on-write for fast, near unlimited snapshots, triple mirroring and triple parity RAID, plus WORM (write once read many) policies for protecting NAS share data from tampering or unauthorised deletion. 

App choices are very similar. Qnap offers around 120 apps for both OSes, with all key backup apps present and correct. These include Qsync for protecting PC, macOS, Android, and iOS end-user devices, and Hybrid Backup Sync 3 for on-appliance data backup and syncing to remote servers.

Remote replication is deftly handled by the SnapSync app, which provides fast snapshot backups to remote QuTS appliances using block-level replication run to a schedule or in real time. The free Hyper Data Protector is great for backing up virtualized environments, and we had no problems using it to create scheduled jobs for selected virtual machines (VMs) on our Hyper-V and VMware vSphere hosts.

For performance testing, we fitted a standard Broadcom dual-port fibre 10GbE card, which was accepted without any problems. It's worth noting that Synology's short-depth RS1221+ rack NAS is only certified for the company's own-brand NICs and storage devices.

NAS performance over 10GbE is excellent, with a share mapped to a Dell T640 Windows Server 2019 host returning Iometer sequential read and write rates both of 9.3Gbits/sec, while random rates panned out at 9.3Gbits/sec and 9.1Gbits/sec. The last two numbers highlight another QuTS advantage: its efficient ARC (adaptive read cache) and ZIL (ZFS intent log) features do away with the need for SSD caches.

Real-world performance is great: copies of a 25GB test file between the NAS and server averaged read and write rates of 8Gbits/sec and 9.1Gbits/sec, while our backup test using a 22.4GB folder with 10,500 files was secured to the share at an average of 2.4Gbits/sec.

IP SAN performance over 10GbE is a mixed bag, with a 1TB iSCSI target delivering read and write rates both of 9.2Gbits/sec. Increasing the pressure with a dual 10GbE MPIO link to the target saw only modest improvements to 13.9Gbits/sec and 10Gbits/sec.

You'll need to double the base memory to run QuTS hero, but the Qnap TS-855eU-RP is ideal for space-poor SMBs as it packs a high storage density into a remarkably small and very quiet rack chassis. It delivers good 10GbE performance and offers an incredible range of business apps for both OSes, with a sharp focus on data protection.

NAS specialist Qnap has lately been expanding into new areas such as network switching. It’s now turning its attention to the SMB videoconferencing market with the KoiBox-100W. It’s a clever concept: a portable appliance that can operate as both an all-in-one conferencing solution and a wireless screen-sharing station for in-person presentations.

If you’re fed up with monthly subscriptions, there’s one feature you’ll like right away. Instead of charging a recurrent fee, the KoiBox is a one-off purchase with all licences included. That gets you support for the most popular conferencing platforms, including Skype, Microsoft Teams and Zoom. The KoiBox will appeal equally to businesses that want to go off-grid, as it can provide private conferencing services too, with Qnap taking care of all user authentication and meeting connections.

Inside, the KoiBox is powered by a 1.8GHz Intel Celeron 6305 CPU, and it pipes 4K video out of a single HDMI port at the rear. Next to it sit four USB-A 3.2 Gen 2 ports, to which you can connect cameras, speakers, microphones, a keyboard and mouse as required, plus a Gigabit Ethernet socket - although you may not need this as the KoiBox has built-in Wi-Fi 6.

You can’t see it, but there’s one final connector: an internal SFF drive bay, into which you can install an SSD to record your meetings. We were able to slot in and use a 1.92TB Micron SATA SSD with no fuss.

Setting up the KoiBox is very easy. You just connect it to a display and use the included remote-control handset to step through the onscreen setup wizard. This guided us through choosing a language, formatting the SSD and confirming our AV equipment as working (we tried both a Logitech ConferenceCam Connect and a Poly Studio P15 system, and had no problem with either).

Once setup is complete, the KoiBox presents a colourful homescreen from which you can access all functions using the remote. To share your screen from a PC you just need to enter the IP address of the appliance in Chrome or Firefox, select the wireless projection option and choose whether you want to cast the entire screen, a window or a browser tab.

Mobile screen sharing is supported, too: we tried the free KoiCast iOS app on an iPad. This immediately opened with a view of the KoiBox’s screen, allowing us to see what someone else was sharing, or begin a sharing session of our own.

Cloud meetings are easy to set up, especially if you’re using Microsoft Teams, as the KoiBox has native integration with this platform. After we’d assigned one of our Team user accounts to the KoiBox we were right away presented with the standard interface we all know and love.

For private video calls the appliance uses the KoiMeeter app – the same one as found on Qnap’s NAS appliances, but pre-registered so you don’t have to worry about time limits. Unhelpfully, the user manual neglects to explain how PC and Mac users can join private meetings, but it’s easily done – they just need to point a web browser at the KoiMeeter website and log in with their Qnap account. Remote participants get a picture-in-picture view in their browser, along with video and audio controls, a screen-sharing button and facilities to invite other users up to the maximum of four per meeting.

If remote users are logged into the KoiMeeter web service, they can also be invited to meetings directly from the KoiBox by entering their personal KoiCode. This is one reason you might want to connect a keyboard: the remote control works, but it’s tedious having to use it to flick through the onscreen dial-pad.

Mobile users can use the KoiMeeter app for iOS and Android to start meetings and accept requests from the KoiBox, or they can bypass the KoiBox entirely and use the app to conduct private meetings amongst themselves.

The KoiBox-100W is an intriguing alternative to the mainstream providers. Once you’ve added the cost of a 4K camera and audio equipment it isn’t much cheaper than a budget video bar, but it’s easy to set up and use, it will appeal to SMBs wanting private videoconferencing services, and the screen-sharing capabilities are a nice bonus.

Qnap KoiBox-100W specifications

Not a lot of people know this, but NAS specialist Qnap has been making ruggedised storage appliances for quite a few years. It entered this specialised market back in 2014 with the IS-400 Pro, upped its game at the end of 2015 with the IS-453S and after a seven year hiatus, has now launched the TS-i410X.

Designed in collaboration with Intel, the TS-i410X is aimed at a wide range of deployment scenarios including transportation, warehouses and factories. Built for harsh environments, it looks to have the right credentials: it’s clothed in an upgraded version of the battle-hardened aluminium and steel chassis used by its predecessors and is certified to operate in temperatures ranging from -40 to +70 degrees C.

This fanless unit uses its chunky finned aluminium casing to act as a massive heatsink and offers four internal hot-swap bays for SATA SFF SSDs. Processing power sees a big boost as the pensionable 1.9GHz Intel Atom E3845 from the IS-435S gets replaced with a more modern quad-core 2GHz Atom x6425E - but although memory is the faster DDR4 variety, the 8GB provided cannot be upgraded.

The 12W TDP Atom CPU is designed by Intel for extended temperature operations and incorporates 10th Gen UHD graphics piped through to the appliance’s rear HDMI 1.4b port. Networking sees big improvements too, as the TS-i410X includes a pair of 10GbE ports that support multi-Gigabit speeds.

Qnap TS-i410X review: Hardware and design

Measuring 180 x 254 x 70mm (WDH), the TS-i410X is slightly larger than the IS-435S, thanks to the flared sides which increase the chassis surface area. Passive cooling is further improved by the thicker chassis material, which absorbs more heat as well as introducing a weight increase of over 1kg.

Along with the dual 10GbE and HDMI rear ports, you have a quartet of USB 3.2 Gen 2 ports which can be used to expand capacity outside the box, with Qnap offering five expansion units in rack or tower formats. There’s one catch though: none of these are fanless, ruggedised models, so they can’t be deployed alongside the TS-i410X in harsh environments.

However, you can network the appliance in these conditions, thanks to Qnap’s QSW-IM1200-8C ruggedised 12-port 10GbE switch. The appliance comes with a 96W external power supply unit and has a separate 2-pin socket for an optional 9-36V DC input.

Installing SSDs is easy enough, and the four hot-swap aluminium drive carriers are accessed by unscrewing and removing the front panel. For testing, we fitted two 1.92TB Micron SATA SSDs but to operate the appliance at the upper end of its temperature range, you should consider industrial-grade SSDs such as the Exascend SI3 which can handle from -40 up to +85 degrees C.

Qnap TS-i410X review: Deployment and QTS 5

Following the web-based quick start wizard to install the latest QTS 5 software is a swift process. The TS-i410X sadly doesn’t support Qnap’s QuTS OS, as many features, such as caching, require more than 8GB of memory.

This isn’t a deal breaker though, as QTS offers a wealth of business apps including plenty of data protection services. You can run on-demand and scheduled snapshots for NAS shares and iSCSI LUNs on standard EXT4 volumes and easily create a data backup strategy using the smart Hybrid Backup Sync (HBS) 3 app.

The appliance makes a great discrete IP camera monitoring and recording solution, with the free version of Qnap’s QVR Pro app including an 8-channel license and supporting 14 days of video playback. Extra camera licenses can be purchased with prices starting at around £307 for an extra 8 channels, which also enables unlimited playback.

The appliance can host virtual machines via the Container Station, Ubuntu Linux Station and Virtualization Station apps. However, the maximum 8GB of memory will once again limit the number of VMs it can present.

Qnap TS-i410X review: 10GbE performance

With the dual SSDs configured in a mirror, we mapped a NAS share over 10GbE to a Dell EMC PowerEdge T640 Xeon Scalable server running Windows Server 2019. Iometer reported very good speeds, with sequential read and write rates settling at 9.3Gbits/sec and 9.2Gbits/sec.

These translated to good real world speeds; drag and drop copies of a 25GB test file averaged read and write speeds of 8Gbits/sec and 4Gbits/sec. Backup performance is just as good, and securing a 22.4GB folder with 10,500 small files to the share averaged a tidy 2Gbits/sec. The Atom CPU handled encryption duties well, too. Copying the 25GB test file to an encrypted share averaged 2.3Gbits/sec with CPU utilisation peaking at 62%.

Moving over to IP SANs saw equally good speeds, with a 500GB iSCSI LUN mustering Iometer sequential read and write speeds of 9.2Gbits/sec and 9.1Gbits/sec. Using the appliance’s second port, we then created a dual 10GbE MPIO link to the target and saw read and write speeds ramp up nicely to 13.2Gbits/sec and 12.2Gbits/sec although CPU usage hit 91%.

The August heatwave came in handy for testing the chassis’ cooling efficiency. We placed the appliance in an unventilated room during all four days and although the ambient room temperature reached 37 degrees C, we could see from the QTS hardware information page that the system, CPU and SSDs never went beyond 46 degrees C.

Qnap TS-i410X review: Verdict

The TS-i410X is aimed at a niche market, with much of its competition coming from manufacturers such as ioSafe, Eurotech, Nexcom and Galleon. However, most of the latter are a lot more expensive, as many are built for specialist markets such as the defense and aerospace industries.

As a general-purpose ruggedized NAS, the TS-i410X is better value and Qnap’s QTS software makes it much more versatile, too. The maximum 8GB of memory places some limitations on the number of apps it can run, but this little desktop tank can’t be faulted for build quality or 10GbE performance.

Qnap TS-i410X review specifications

Qnap’s mighty TS-h2490FU enterprise all-Flash array (AFA) impressed us when we reviewed it last year, with a combination of pure NVMe performance and value that will appeal to budget-conscious businesses. Not content to rest on its laurels, Qnap now makes a 12-bay desktop version available for SMBs and large teams that want fast data access and run demanding workloads such as real-time 4K/8K video editing.

The TS-h1290FX will appeal to smaller offices in particular, as this compact tower is designed to be super quiet. This doesn’t come at the cost of features either, as the appliance is available with a choice of three AMD EPYC 7002 Gen 2 CPUs, has room for up to 1TB of DDR4 memory and offers all the expansion potential you could possibly want.

All three models come with pairs of embedded 2.5GbE multi-Gigabit and 25GbE SFP28 ports, and the four free PCI-E 4 expansion slots means there’s plenty of room to add a lot more. You can also balance storage costs with performance requirements, as unlike the TS-h2490FU (which only supports U.2 form-factor NVMe SSDs), the TS-h1290FX also accepts SATA SFF HDDs and SSDs.

Qnap TS-h1290FX review: Build quality and hardware features

We’ve reviewed the base model, which sports an 8-core AMD EPYC 7232P CPU teamed up with a decent 64GB of DDR4 ECC memory. A minor complaint is Qnap supplies the memory as eight 8GB DIMMs, so any upgrades will require some or all of them to be replaced, as there aren’t any spare slots.

Its slick design means the TS-h1290FX will look good on your desktop and we can’t fault build quality either; it’s presented in a sturdy pressed steel shell with a solid metal cover. Removing the lid reveals a tidy interior, with the AMD CPU topped off with a large active heatsink and easy access afforded to all PCI-E and memory slots.

A meaty 750W internal PSU sits at the rear and alongside are two 9cm cooling fans, which we found to be barely audible in our office environment – even under heavy load. A nice touch is the appliance supports plenty of GPGPU cards and Qnap has fitted two extra cables to provide additional power for them.

The two rear USB 3.2 ports can be used to add Qnap’s disk expansion tower or rack units for a cheaper, high-capacity storage vault for services such as backup. If you want better performance, the appliance accepts Qnap’s SATA and SAS expansion cards.

Qnap TS-h1290FX review: OS choices and apps

You can choose from Qnap’s QTS or QuTS operating systems during installation and we recommend the latter if you want the best data protection. Both present almost identical web consoles, but delve deeper into QuTS and you’ll find this 128-bit ZFS-based OS offers valuable features such as near unlimited NAS share and iSCSI LUN snapshots, end-to-end checksums, encryption, inline data deduplication and compression.

There’s more as along with the usual RAID suspects, QuTS supports triple parity RAID to protect against three drive failures, and triple mirroring which stores identical copies of your data on three drives. NAS share data can also be protected from tampering by applying one of two WORM (write once read many) policies.

For IP SANs, you use the standard iSCSI & Fibre Channel app and during LUN creation, you can apply thick or thin provisioning, deduplication and compression. NAS and iSCSI snapshots are easily created from the Storage & Snapshots app and can be run manually or scheduled for as often as every five minutes.

There’s no shortage of apps for the TS-h1290FX: we counted nearly 100 available in its download support page. All backup and file syncing apps are present and include Hybrid Backup Sync (HBS) 3, Qsync Central and HybridMount plus Hyper Data Protector for protecting VMware and Hyper-V virtualised environments.

Qnap TS-h1290FX review: 25GbE performance

For our lab testing, we fitted a full house of 1.6TB WD DC SN640 U.2 NVMe SSDs in the appliance and created a single RAID5 array. Our test host was a Dell EMC PowerEdge R650xs rack server equipped with dual 28-core Xeon Scalable Gold 6330 CPUs, 256GB of DDR4 and two dual-port 25GbE network cards, with Windows Server 2022 at the helm.

NAS performance over 25GbE is excellent. With a share mapped to our test server over a single DAC (direct access cable) connection, Iometer reported 23.1Gbits/sec both for sequential reads and writes with random operations returning 23Gbits/sec and 22.8Gbits/sec.

IP SAN speeds over 25GbE are equally impressive, with a 1TB iSCSI target returning Iometer sequential read and write speeds of 22.8Gbits/sec and 23.1Gbits/sec with I/O throughputs using 4KB block sizes measured at 163,200 and 142,200 IOPS. Moving to random operations saw 22.3Gbits/sec and 22.8Gbits/sec and 162,800 and 99,800 IOPS.

Stepping up to a dual 25GbE MPIO connection saw sequential and random speeds increase to 37.7Gbits/sec and 41.1Gbits/sec and 37.4Gbits/sec and 39Gbits/sec respectively. Throughput numbers for sequential and random operations improved to 215,300 and 205,210 and 206,300 and 115,100 IOPS.

With an extra Qnap dual-port SmartNIC 25GbE PCI-E card fitted in the appliance, we created a quad-port MPIO connection and recorded sequential and random read and write speeds of 58.9Gbits/sec and 59.5Gbits/sec and 50.2Gbits/sec and 51.5Gbits/sec. IOPS numbers for sequential and random operations saw reasonable increases to 307,500 and 310,200 and 304,300 and 135,400.

Qnap TS-h1290FX review: Verdict

The TS-h1290FX impresses on many levels; this quite unique desktop AFA combines a dozen PCI-E 4 NVMe SSDs with a powerful AMC EPYC processor and delivers it all at a remarkably good price. Add in the integral 25GbE ports and great performance, and you have a storage system that will undoubtedly satisfy content creators, video editors and businesses that need super-fast access to their data.

Qnap TS-h1290FX specifications

Space-poor SMBs will love Qnap’s TS-873AU-RP, an 8-bay appliance that packs a lot into a comparatively small package. Its 2U rack chassis measures only 425mm deep, so it will slip easily into a small data cabinet or can be placed conveniently on a desk.

This shortness doesn’t come at the cost of features, though. It’s powered by a quad-core 2.2GHz AMD Ryzen V1500B CPU, and the base 4GB of DDR4 memory can be boosted to 64GB. The network is handled by dual 2.5GbE multi-gig ports, a pair of PCIe slots provide plenty of upgrade options, and the price includes two hot-plug 300W PSUs.

You also get a choice of operating systems. It can run Qnap’s QTS or QuTS hero, although to get the best from the latter you may need to upgrade the memory. Its inline deduplication and SSD caching features need at least 16GB of RAM, and upgrading to 10GbE speeds can require up to 32GB for the best possible performance.

QTS doesn’t offer the same level of integral data protection and storage-saving features as the ZFS-based QuTS, but is less demanding, as 4GB of memory allows it to handle 1TB SSD cache sizes. You can change the OS whenever you want, but this requires a factory reset so back up your data first.

Both OSes present identical web consoles and support virtually all of Qnap’s apps, so there’s plenty to play with. Along with scheduled snapshots, all backup apps are available for both and include Hybrid Backup Sync (HBS) 3, Qsync Central and HybridMount plus Hyper Data Protector for VMware and Hyper-V virtualised environments.

The appliance can function as a virtualisation host, although a memory upgrade may be prudent to ensure there’s enough for your VMs. You can use the Container Station to run Docker apps in lightweight containers while the Virtualization Station can host just about any OS you want.

QuTS makes its presence felt when creating NAS shares; it offers options for thick or thin provisioning, encryption, compression, deduplication and WORM (write once read many). WORM isn’t available for IP SANs but you can apply thick or thin provisioning, deduplication and compression, and both OSes also support Fibre Channel adapter cards.

When WORM is enabled on a NAS share, it can’t be modified or disabled, with the Enterprise policy allowing a protected folder to be deleted but stopping anything in it from being individually modified or removed. The tougher Compliance policy only allows a folder to be deleted by removing its parent storage pool.

For performance testing, we used four 14TB Western Digital Red Plus HDDs configured as a RAID5 array and hooked the appliance up over 10GbE to a Dell EMC T640 tower server running Windows Server 2019. Both operating systems delivered great performance for NAS shares, with Iometer recording a shade over 9Gbits/sec for sequential read and write operations.

Real world test speeds when copying a 25GB file between the appliance and server were also very similar. Both OSes delivered around 6.8Gbits/sec for reads and writes, and each secured our 22.4GB backup test folder at 2.1Gbits/sec.

IP SAN testing revealed some differences, with a 500GB iSCSI target managed by QTS returning Iometer read and write rates of 8.8Gbits/sec and 9Gbits/sec and QuTS averaging 7.6Gbits/sec and 9.1Gbits/sec. A dual 10GbE MPIO link to the target saw the gap widen for read performance with QTS ramping up to 14.6Gbits/sec and QuTS languishing at 8.4Gbits/sec.

The TS-873AU-RP offers a great storage package in a space-saving chassis. You’ll need to upgrade memory to get the best from it, but it offers good all-round performance, and the choice of operating systems makes it very versatile.

Qnap TS-873AU-RP specifications

Taiwanese tech company QNAP has warned that DeadBolt ransomware is targeting owners of its network-attached storage (NAS) drives for the third time this year.

Following initial attacks by DeadBolt in January 2022, QNAP took the highly controversial decision to force-update users’ drives to firmware versions DeadBolt couldn’t successfully exploit.

The campaign then re-emerged in March after a period of downtime, infecting more than 1,000 devices, according to Censys.

The latest ransomware campaign is primarily targeting NAS drives running QTS firmware version 4.3.6 and 4.4.1, QNAP said – a narrower target pool than the initial incident earlier this year.

QNAP also said the affected models were mainly the TS-x51 series and TS-x53 series of NAS drives. The advice given to users who believe they be vulnerable to DeadBolt is to update to the latest version of QTS and avoid exposing their product to the internet.

QNAP officially confirmed the third DeadBolt campaign on 19 May, but Unit 42 researchers said users may have been targeted as early as 13 May.

There has been no substantial analysis of the latest version of DeadBolt, but Unit 42 said the ransomware program made some significant changes since the March campaign.

Specifically, the DeadBolt program now uses revised JavaScript code with a stronger SHA-256 implementation, building on the previous, lower-level ‘SubtleCrypto’ cryptography. Unit 42 researchers said this was likely changed to a stronger standard to accelerate the key verification process and also to ensure the verification works on browsers that do not support the SubtleCrypto API.

In addition to a revised back end, DeadBolt also has a new ransom note and updated CSS code, along with the same master key as previously used. Unit 42 believes the latest campaign has infected around 3,000 devices.

Quickfire QNAP-DeadBolt overview

QNAP’s NAS drives were targeted by DeadBolt ransomware as of 7 January 2022. At the time, the type of ransomware used against the products was not known and neither was the scope of the attack.

On 25 January, both individual and business users started reporting infections with ransom demands set at 0.3 Bitcoin for individual users, or 50 Bitcoin from QNAP in exchange for the ransomware actors backing down.

The next day, QNAP advised all users to update their devices, a day before the company made the controversial move to force-update vulnerable hardware.

The move was met with anger from corners of the QNAP community. Many users had finely tuned NAS configurations that were undone with the update and some complained they were left no more secure than before the company forced the firmware update.

Others were more aggrieved at the company’s decision to force the update in the first place, the main argument being that users should have the choice to update or not, given that it was their product.

According to Censys, the first DeadBolt campaign infected just shy of 5,000 devices and the second affected more than 1,000.

Short depth NAS appliances are great for small businesses with limited office space and Qnap’s TS-x64U series pushes their storage density to the next level. On review is the TS-1264U-RP, which delivers 12 hot-swap storage bays in a 2U high chassis that’s only 423mm deep - allowing it to be slotted into a small wall cabinet or even placed on a desk.

Qnap keeps the price down by fitting the appliance with the same 2GHz quad-core Intel Celeron N5105/N5095 CPU as featured in some of its entry-level models such as the 3-bay TS-364. The TS-1264U-RP sports a Celeron N5105 which has a slightly lower 10W TDP than the N5095’s 15W, and a marginally faster Intel UHD Graphics 24 embedded chipset, which pipes its 4K video through to the rear HDMI 1.4b port.

Memory starts at a modest 4GB of DDR4 which can be boosted to a maximum of 16GB. This doesn’t seem a lot, but the appliance only supports the standard QTS operating system, which is less demanding than Qnap’s memory-hungry QuTS.

Qnap TS-1264U-RP review: Hardware features

Build quality is up to the standard we expect from Qnap, with the chassis constructed of solid steel and the non-lockable drive carriers equipped with sturdy metal trays. There isn’t much to see inside with the compact motherboard employing a small passive heatsink for the Celeron CPU and a lightweight plastic air shroud to direct air over it from the 12cm diameter fan behind.

Further cooling is provided by a second 12cm fan and we found the appliance to be very quiet during operation, making it a sound choice for small offices. The 4GB of base memory is supplied on a single SO-DIMM module with a second vacant slot above, although you’ll need to replace it with an 8GB module if you want to upgrade to 16GB.

Multi-Gigabit networking is on the menu with dual 2.5GbE ports at the rear, and these are partnered by duets of standard USB 2 and faster USB 3.2 ports with the HDMI port alongside. Further expansion is possible with a spare PCI-E 3 slot, although this is only the x2 variety, so you won’t see the maximum benefits of upgrading to 10GbE speeds.

The slot offers plenty of other options though, as it supports Qnap’s Wi-Fi 6 adapter and a range of cards with dual M.2 SSD slots that can be used for caching. Value gets a further boost, considering the price includes a pair of 300W hot-plug PSUs.

Qnap TS-1264U-RP review: QTS 5 apps

For testing, we loaded a quartet of 14TB WD Red Pro HDDs, fired the appliance up and followed the web-based quick start wizard to install the latest version of QTS 5. Its upgraded Linux kernel delivers a fresher and more responsive web console and provides a pop-up notice board so you don’t miss important alerts.

SMBs looking for plenty of data backup features will find QTS is positively overflowing with them. It supports on-demand and scheduled snapshots for NAS shares and iSCSI LUNs on standard EXT4 volumes, while the slick Hybrid Backup Sync (HBS) 3 app helps you create a 3-2-1 backup strategy in as few as four clicks.

The Hyper Data Protector (HDP) app extends backup and restore capabilities to VMware and Hyper-V virtualized environments. It opens a dedicated web console for all backup and restore management and we had no problems adding our VMware vCenter host, selecting VMs and scheduling backup tasks. The appliance can also host virtual machines, thanks to the Container Station, Ubuntu Linux Station and Virtualization Station apps. However, the maximum 16GB of memory will limit the number of VMs it can present.

Boxafe provides NAS-based backup services for Google WorkSpace plus Microsoft 365 cloud accounts, and Nakivo provides an app to allow the appliance to host its excellent Backup & Replication software. Security gets plenty of attention too; QTS 5 supports TLS 1.3 HTTPS connections, the Security Counselor apps warns of any weaknesses and the new TeamViewer app provides facilities for stricter remote access.

Qnap TS-1264U-RP review: 2.5GbE and 10GbE performance

For 2.5GbE performance testing, we hooked the appliance up to our Zyxel XS1930-12HP 10GbE multi-Gigabit switch and mapped a NAS share to a Dell PowerEdge T640 Xeon Scalable tower server running Windows Server 2019. Speeds were on the money, with Iometer reporting sequential read and write rates of 2.3Gbits/sec and 2.2Gbits/sec, while our real world copies of a 25GB test file also delivering the same speeds.

Backing up a 22.4GB test folder containing 10,500 small files returned 1Gbits/sec, while copying our 25GB file to an encrypted folder averaged 1.9Gbits/sec. Moving testing over to IP SANs, meanwhile, saw Iometer read and write speeds for a 500GB iSCSI target settle at 2.2Gbits/sec and 2Gbits/sec.

Next, we installed an Emulex 10GbE fibre card in the appliance, which was accepted without any issues. For the mapped NAS share, Iometer recorded raw read and write rates of 5.2Gbits/sec and 5.1Gbit/sec with the card installed, while the large file copies improved to 3.5Gbits/sec and 3.3Gbits/sec.

Our backup test sped up to 1.5Gbits/sec and the encryption test received a boost to 2.5Gbits/sec. IP SANs saw similar improvements, as read and write performance for the 500GB target more than doubled to 5.3Gbits/sec and 5.2Gbits/sec.

Qnap TS-1264U-RP review: Verdict

SMBs that want to maximize their rack space will find the TS-1264U-RP can cram a high storage capacity into the smallest of spaces. It can’t match Synology’s 12-bay RS2421RP+ rack NAS for 10GbE performance but it is slightly better value, doesn’t have the same hard disk compatibility restrictions and, crucially, is significantly shorter.

It only supports Qnap’s QTS software but we don’t see this as an issue as this OS delivers a wealth of apps, including a great set of data protection services. Space-poor SMBs that want a high-capacity backup vault will find the TS-1264U-RP hard to beat.

Qnap TS-1264U-RP review specifications

QNAP users affected by the DeadBolt ransomware incident last week have been dealt another blow as users report being unable to decrypt their files after paying the ransom because the company's controversial forced update removed the ransomware's binary.

Now available to download, Emisoft’s decryptor works only for victims who have paid the ransom but were unable to acquire an official decryptor from the ransomware operators before their network-attached storage (NAS) drive updated. The forced security update QNAP issued last week isolated the DeadBolt binary, making it inaccessible to users, but needs to be accessible to fully decrypt the victim’s device.

"To make this abundantly clear: this will not get you around paying the ransom," said Fabian Wosar, Emisoft CTO, on social media. "Victims will still need to provide the key. It is merely an alternative decryption tool if you can't use the mechanism provided by the threat actors due to QNAP forcing a firmware update."

Official QNAP support explained to users over the weekend that the forced update triggered QNAP's Malware Remover tool to "quarantine" the DeadBolt ransomware rather than deleting it. A support representative said users can contact the QNAP helpdesk team to remove the DeadBolt page block and use a decryptor key, should they obtain one, to begin the file decrypting process.

It's currently unconfirmed if the Emisoft decryptor can be used in the decryption process described by QNAP support, but IT Pro has contacted both Emisoft and QNAP for clarity.

QNAP users were last week controversially subjected to a forced firmware update after a DeadBolt ransomware incident targeted and crippled thousands of NAS drives. Users expressed anger towards the Taiwan-based hardware firm for forcing the update without their permission and some argued their devices were left weaker than they were before.

Users reported losing large amounts of data after being hit with DeadBolt, including high-profile podcast host and MIT research scientist Lex Fridman, who lost 50Tb of data after being handed a 0.3 Bitcoin ransom demand (roughly £8,100 at the time).

Explaining the fiasco

QNAP published a press release today explaining how and why the forced update was issued to all QNAP customers, adding that it still recommends not exposing NAS products to the internet.

The company explained that if the auto-update function for the 'Recommended Version' is enabled on a user's NAS drive, then the drive will automatically update to the firmware version QNAP believes to be the most secure.

User's originally expressed confusion as to why their product underwent an auto-update, having not manually enabled the auto-update setting. QNAP support explained that with firmware version 4.5.0 the feature was disabled by default, but was enabled in firmware version 4.5.3 with users thinking the setting would transfer unchanged after upgrading to the newer version.

"Recommended version does not apply to every update," said QNAP support. "So people did not realise recommended update was enabled on their NAS. But after Deadbolt, we released a recommended update to protect from deadbolt. Because this update was set as a "recommended version", NAS with "recommended version" enabled updated.

"Having recommended version enabled by default did allow us to protect many NAS units. But if anyone does not want this feature, they can disable it."

The company added that it understood services could be interrupted during the update and that it is always looking to improve its products. Users can find further information in QNAP's official statement.

Chief points of contention were echoed in response to today's announcement with some users saying Universal Plug and Play (UPnP), a set of networking principles allowing devices to discover others on a shared network, should be disabled by default. This will disable port forwarding and secure the device, for the most part, from attacks such as the DeadBolt incident.

Others reiterated their concern over the absent warning users were given that an automatic update was coming, while one complaint that QNAP said it would consider implementing, was that firmware versions should have been backported so fixes could have been applied to users on both versions 4.x and 5.x.

Ransomware recap

QNAP released a security update on 27 January for the DeadBolt ransomware campaign it said had been "widely targeting" users' devices for a number of days. This was automatically initiated for all QNAP customers sparking fury in the community.

More than 3,000 NAS drives were successfully encrypted with DeadBolt ransomware with ransom demands ranging between 0.3 Bitcoin to 50 Bitcoin for decryptor tools. Many individual and business users reported paying the ransom to restore access to their data at the time.

QNAP justified the forced update as a difficult but necessary decision to secure the majority of NAS products around the world, but users expressed anger towards the firm for issuing the automatic patch.

Many owners of NAS drives operate on older firmware versions for various reasons, and updating to newer, safer releases can be an arduous process given the highly individualised configurations running from user to user.

QNAP customers have expressed anger towards the company after it forced a security update on large numbers of its users' network-attached storage (NAS) drives.

The NAS manufacturer announced on Wednesday that DeadBolt ransomware was "widely targeting" QNAP drives and locking out users until they paid a fee in Bitcoin. Numerous users began reporting that they had fallen victim to the ransomware campaign earlier this week after losing access to files.

A query sent to internet-facing device scanner Censys revealed 3,687 devices have already been encrypted by DeadBolt. In response, QNAP took the controversial step to force-update every users' firmware to the latest version on Thursday.

"We are trying to increase protection against DeadBolt," said an official QNAP support spokesperson in response to one complaint. "If recommended update is enabled under auto-update, then as soon as we have a security patch, it can be applied right away.

"Back in the time of Qlocker, many people got infected after we had patched the vulnerability. In fact, that whole outbreak was after the patch was released. But many people don't apply a security patch on the same day or even the same week it is released. And that makes it much harder to stop a ransomware campaign. We will work on patches/security enhancements against DeadBolt and we hope they get applied right away.

"I know there are arguments both ways as to whether or not we should do this. It is a hard decision to make. But it is because of DeadBolt and our desire to stop this attack as soon as possible that we did this."

QNAP's actions have been met with anger from the community. Some say users' NAS drives, many of which often have finely tuned and individualised configurations that break with certain updates, are just as vulnerable now as they were to DeadBolt if they didn't update to the latest, most secure firmware version.

"You may have had good intentions, but what you did was wrong," said one user in direct response. "You should have rolled out notifications for an emergency update or patch and let users decide.

"If users decide against the update and then get owned by Deadbolt, that is on them. By forcing the update, anyone who has lost data, as a result, is no better off than if Deadbolt had owned them, but worse you have opened QNAP up to legal liability for that loss."

Other users expressed concern over QNAP's ability to force a change on the hardware they own, without first asking permission. Users raised questions around what other powers QNAP has over users' NAS drives, and what the company can do with data stored on them.

For many, the only indication that an update was going to be applied was one short 'beep'. When users investigated what was happening, they found their drive in the middle of rebooting after downloading an update.

Despite the concern, many reports tell of positive experiences with the update, but given that NAS drives are notoriously laborious to update safely without compromising the intricate configurations users create for their individual environments, other users reported deliberately avoiding the update which was ultimately forced on them.

Timeline of .deadbolt attacks

On 10 January 2022, IT Pro reported QNAP's original security statement that it was aware of cyber attackers targeting its NAS drives with ransomware, urging users to update their firmware as soon as possible.

No details of the ransomware strain were reported at the time, nor was the scope of the attackers' targeting, but full details on how to secure drives from outside attacks were provided by the manufacturer.

On Tuesday 25 January 2022, individual and business users started reporting successful DeadBolt attacks with their files being replaced with DeadBolt versions of themselves. Among the victims was high-profile podcast host and MIT research scientist Lex Fridman, who provided screenshots of the messages displayed to users and ransom payments.

Users were asked for 0.3 Bitcoin (roughly £8,100) as a ransom demand. A separate message was also sent to QNAP itself, demanding a payment of 5 Bitcoin (roughly £136,500) for details of the supposed zero-day vulnerability used to exploit the NAS drives, or a total of 50 Bitcoin (roughly £1.3 million) for the universal decryptor and zero-day details.

"It makes me nauseous to say this, but this is real," said another user. "My first client just got hit. Files in File Station will have a .deadbolt extension on them. This client had a secure password, and 2 factor authentication set up. I have just reported this directly. I was expecting to have a nice week this week. I guess that won't be the case for me."

On Wednesday 26 January, QNAP release an official security statement urging users to update their devices and "fight ransomware together". The following day, reports started emerging of forced security updates.

A NASty trend

The targeting of QNAP's NAS drives is the latest episode in a recent trend of cyber attackers targeting internet-facing storage devices. In June 2021, Western Digital customers were similarly targeted with data-wiping malware.

Affected devices hadn't received security updates since 2015, at the time of the attack, with some users reporting total factory resets of their devices and others losing terabytes of data, IT Pro reported.

In response, Western Digital made the unorthodox recommendation to users that they simply unplug their storage devices to prevent from further malware attacks.

Qnap’s TVS-675 is an intriguing NAS appliance. While almost every other storage solution on the market runs on either Intel or AMD silicon, this desktop box gives Chinese x86 CPU manufacturer Zhaoxin its debut on the global stage, courtesy of an eight-core 2.5GHz KaiXian KX-U6580 SoC.

It’s the centrepiece of a very versatile specification. The TVS-675 comes with 8GB of base DDR4 non-ECC memory, which can be upgraded all the way up to 64GB using two 32GB SODIMM modules. The six front-facing SATA bays can support either LFF drives or SFF SSDs, while two internal M.2 NVMe SSD slots can be used to create a fast system pool or a performance-boosting cache.

Connectivity is strong, too. Storage is served up over dual embedded 2.5GbE multi-Gigabit ports, while a pair of PCI-E slots provide scope to upgrade to 10GbE or even Fibre Channel if you wish. And if multimedia is your thing, there’s also an HDMI 2 port capable of 4K video output, thanks to the CPU’s embedded ZhaoXin C-960 graphics processor.

As for the CPU itself, the name may be unfamiliar but you shouldn’t need to worry about compatibility issues. It runs standard 64-bit x86 code, so there’s no restriction on the apps it can run, nor on your choice of operating system: as with most Qnap appliances, when you first boot up the appliance its quick start wizard prompts you to choose between the standard QTS platform and the more advanced QuTS hero OS.

We opted for the former, to try out the new QTS 5 release. This brings an upgraded Linux kernel and a fresh look, with chunkier icons, a new alert noticeboard and a revamped status dashboard.

Access security has been tightened up, too, with support for TLS 1.3 HTTPS connections, an updated VPN app for more secure remote access and a new TeamViewer server app. The latter is easy to use: after installing the app on the appliance, we were able to add it to our TeamViewer account from the client’s nearby devices option, then use it to access the appliance remotely.

Storage features also see a few improvements. The exFAT option that Qnap used to charge for is now free, and the updated kernel increases performance for NVMe SSD caches. The promised Drive Analyser app has yet to be released, but this aims to provide advanced AI-based analytics on storage devices using the third-party ULink cloud service.

For performance testing, we fitted a dual-port fibre 10GbE card in the appliance and hooked it up to a Dell PowerEdge T640 Xeon Scalable tower running Windows Server 2019.

With four 14TB WD Red Plus NAS hard disks loaded in the tool-free carriers, the TVS-675 delivered very respectable NAS speeds, with Iometer reporting sequential read and write rates of 9.2Gbits/sec and 7.1Gbits/sec over a single 10GbE connection. Real-world performance was reasonable too, with copies of a 25GB test file between the NAS and server averaging read and write rates of 4.4Gbits/sec and 3.5Gbits/sec.

The system struggled more with encryption. The CPU does have an embedded AES-NI encryption engine, but when we tried copying our 25GB file to an encrypted share, performance fell to only 0.9Gbits/sec. IP SAN performance was also a mixed bag: a 500GB target mapped over a 10GbE connection gave us read and write rates of 9.2Gbits/sec and 6.5Gbits/sec respectively, which only increased to 11.7Gbits/sec and 6.9Gbits/sec with a dual 10GbE MPIO link.

The Zhaoxin CPU certainly makes the TVS-675 quite unique, but it doesn’t give it any obvious advantages – certainly not enough to justify the price tag of nearly £800. If you don’t need the HDMI port, the award-winning Qnap TS-873A will certainly suit you better: its AMD Ryzen processor delivers superior performance, it offers two extra drive bays, and it also costs £40 less.

Qnap TVS-675 specifications

QNAP customers have been advised that cyber attackers are targeting its network-attached storage (NAS) products with ransomware and have been encouraged to secure their devices at the earliest opportunity.

Ransomware and brute-force cyber attacks have been "widely targeting" QNAP's internet-facing NAS products, according to the manufacturer which published a products security statement on Friday.

NAS drives that are exposed to the internet without any protection are particularly vulnerable to the attacks and users are advised to revisit their security settings to ensure devices are adequately protected.

The scale of attacks is currently unclear and QNAP also didn't specify what strain of ransomware the attackers are using, or where the attackers are based. IT Pro has contacted QNAP for additional comment.

To check if a NAS drive is vulnerable to the attacks QNAP has observed, users should open the QNAP Security Counselor on their NAS products. The NAS is at high risk if there is an artefact that reads: 'The System Administration service can be directly accessible from an external IP address via the following protocols: HTTP' on the dashboard. QNAP also has a guide for users on how to check which ports on a router are exposed to the internet.

Securing the NAS

The first step to fully protect vulnerable products from the ongoing attacks is to disable the port forwarding function of the router. This can be completed via the management interface of a user's router. Users should check their settings and disable the port forwarding setting of NAS management service port which is set at port 8080 and 433 by default.

Users should finally disable the universal plug and play (UPnP) function of their QNAP NAS product in the QTS menu in myQNAPcloud. To do this, users can navigate to the 'Auto Route Configuration' tab in the QTS menu and unselect 'Enable UPnP Port forwarding'.

The past twelve months have brought challenges for almost all businesses, but they’ve also brought some terrific products. New generations of servers and appliances have arrived, offering levels of horsepower and capacity that would have seemed outlandish just a few years ago. At the same time, value has continued to climb, bringing new possibilities within reach of an SMB budget.

There’s been plenty of exciting developments for end users too. Stunning laptops, tablets and phones have turned our heads, along with powerful printers, scanners and screens. And while threats like phishing and ransomware haven’t gone away, the latest generation of security software is here to keep us safe.

As always, there’s no such thing as a perfect product – every business and every individual will have their own needs and preferences. But we’ve put together our selection of the greatest releases of the past twelve months, to reveal the standout products across a wide range of categories, and to celebrate the manufacturers who’ve driven innovation forward in 2021.

Best laptop 2021

WINNER: LG Gram 17

Weighing just 1.35kg, the Gram 17 is barely heavier than many 14in laptops – yet it has a huge, bright 17in display that’s fantastic for productivity and on-the-go presentations.

There’s plenty of horsepower here too, with an 11th-generation Intel Core i7 processor and 16GB of RAM on board. With nearly 13 hours of battery life it won’t conk out half-way through the day, and a spacious keyboard and trackpad mean it’s also a pleasure to work on for extended periods. Throw in Thunderbolt 4 and Wi-Fi 6 and you have an excellent do-it-all, go-anywhere computer for a very reasonable £1,599 exc VAT.

Read our full LG Gram 17 review

HIGHLY COMMENDED: Razer Book 13

Razer made its name with gaming laptops, but the company’s first business-friendly model is a big hit. It looks stylish yet serious, with a superb screen that challenges the MacBook Pro for brightness and colour quality. Performance is top-notch too, thanks to an Intel Core i7-1165G7 processor, and there’s a great selection of ports, including full-sized USB and HDMI connectors. At 1.4kg it’s a little weighty for a 13in laptop, but overall it’s a great, capable choice for an everyday working companion.

Read our full Razer Book 13 review

Best Chromebook 2021

WINNER: Acer Chromebook Spin 713

There are plenty of sub-£500 Chromebooks on the market, but Acer’s Chromebook Spin 713 feels like something much more expensive. Its 13.5in QHD screen has a comfortable 3:2 aspect ratio, and it flips all the way around so you can work in laptop, stand or tablet mode. Unusually, there’s an HDMI output too, giving you additional working options.

Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5 round out the feature set, and with a total weight of just 1.2kg the Spin 713 is deliciously portable too. It would have been nice if Acer had given that beautiful screen an anti-glare coating, but when the rest of the package is this good we can live with a few reflections.

Read our full Acer Chromebook Spin review

HIGHLY COMMENDED: Lenovo IdeaPad Flex 5

The Flex 5 is another Chromebook with a 360º-rotating screen, though its 16:9 aspect ratio is best suited to conventional laptop-style usage. It’s slimmer and lighter than the Acer Spin 713, and its bright display is less reflective. Connectivity is well covered with both USB Type-A and Type-C ports, along with Wi-Fi 6; if you’re looking for a no-nonsense Chrome OS workhorse, you won’t be disappointed.

Read our full Lenovo IdeaPad Flex 5 review

Best tablet 2021

WINNER: Apple iPad Pro 12.9in

With Apple’s mighty M1 processor, the iPad Pro is fully as powerful as a MacBook Pro. And it has several advantages over the laptop: at 680g it’s less than half the weight, and the touchscreen makes for a slick, tactile experience. The 120Hz mini-LED display is stunning, and a battery life of around 13 and a half hours means you can keep working all through the day and beyond.

No doubt, the 12.9in format is bulky for a tablet, while the optional keyboard pushes up the weight – and the price, which is already steep at £916 exc VAT for the base model. Even so, this is unquestionably the best tablet on the market: it doesn’t just excel at tablet tasks, it redefines what a tablet can do.

Read our full Apple iPad Pro 12.9in review

HIGHLY COMMENDED: Nokia T20

It’s short on flashy gimmicks, but Nokia’s T20 feels like a professional tablet. The aluminium build is strong and sturdy, performance and features are up to par, and while we felt the 10.4in screen looked a little cold, its 5:3 aspect ratio is very comfortable to work on. The most impressive part is the price – just £150 exc VAT for the Wi-Fi 5 edition, or £167 exc VAT for the LTE model.

Read our full Nokia T20 review

Best smartphone 2021

WINNER: Apple iPhone 13

The iPhone 13 improves on last year’s iPhone 12 models with better cameras and a bigger battery, adding nearly two hours of daily performance in our tests. You get more storage in the standard model too, up from 64GB to 128GB, and the latest Apple A15 Bionic CPU for true Android-smashing performance.

All the usual iPhone strengths are here, including an excellent screen and a vast library of high-quality apps for work or play. It’s hardly an adventurous update from the iPhone 12, but if you’re choosing a new smartphone today – and aren’t already enmeshed in the Android ecosystem – then the iPhone 13 is the obvious choice.

Read our full Apple iPhone 13 review

HIGHLY COMMENDED: OnePlus 9 Pro

Standing 163mm tall, the OnePlus 9 Pro is large, but it’s perhaps the most beautiful Android smartphone we’ve seen, with a tiny bezel and beautifully textured case. Its 120Hz AMOLED display is a joy to behold, and a collaboration with Hasselblad ensures excellent photo and video quality. Performance is very strong too, courtesy of a top-tier Snapdragon 888 processor; at £829 exc VAT it’s not a budget option, but you get what you pay for.

Read our full OnePlus 9 Pro review

Best desktop server 2021

WINNER: HPE ProLiant MicroServer Gen10 Plus

The MicroServer Gen10 Plus really can fit happily on a desktop, as its square chassis measures a mere 245mm along each side. Yet it’s powerful enough to run a wide range of business services, with your choice of a dual-core 3.8GHz Pentium Gold G5420 CPU or a quad-core 3.4GHz Xeon E-2224. Four integrated LFF SATA drive bays allow for plenty of storage.

The small size means there’s not much scope for internal expansion, but you do get a single PCI-E x16 slot, and remote management can be added via the cheap iLO5 enablement kit. With the entry-level diskless system starting at just £395 exc VAT, it’s an excellent SMB-friendly deal.

Read our full HPE ProLiant MicroServer Gen10 Plus review

HIGHLY COMMENDED: Dell EMC PowerEdge T550

The T550 is a real “tower of power” – we tested it with a 12-core 2.1GHz Xeon Silver 4310 CPU, but if you need more grunt it can handle twin CPUs with up to 32 cores each. It also supports up to 24 SFF or eight LFF drives, and a maximum of 1TB of DDR4 RAM. Dell’s comprehensive iDRAC9 remote management platform comes as standard, making this an ideal answer to demanding workloads.

Read our full Dell EMC PowerEdge T550 review

Best 1U server 2021

WINNER: Dell EMC PowerEdge R650

Dell’s latest PowerEdge R650 design crams an amazing amount of potential into a 1U chassis. It supports Xeon Scalable CPUs with up to 40 cores and a massive 4TB of memory, with space inside for up to ten SFF drives and 16 Intel Optane modules to accelerate performance.

If that’s not enough, you also get three PCI-E Gen4 x16 slots and an OCP 3.0 edge slot, plus Dell’s BOSS card for fast booting from SSD media. And as usual with Dell, the iDRAC9 controller provides terrific remote management. It’s not a budget option – our review unit came to £15,417 exc VAT – but the PowerEdge R650 is an incredibly powerful and space-efficient server.

Read our full Dell EMC PowerEdge R650 review

HIGHLY COMMENDED: Broadberry CyberServe Xeon

This low-profile server offers a solid chunk of power for just under £1,000. That gets you a quad-core Intel Xeon E-2224 CPU with 16GB of RAM – upgradeable to 128GB – and you’re free to fit your own drives in the four SFF bays and twin M.2 SSD slots. The single PCI-E Gen3 x16 slot can be used to add 10GbE networking, and the Asus motherboard supports web-based management, including full OS remote control and virtual media services as standard.

Read our full Broadberry CyberServe Xeon E-RS100-E10 review

Best 2U server 2021

WINNER: Broadberry CyberServe SP2 208-8I G3

The CyberServe SP2 208-8I G3 is designed for a hardcore server role. The system we tested came with a pair of 36-core Xeon Scalable Platinum CPUs, 512GB of DDR4 RAM, five 960GB SATA SSDs and eight 128GB Intel Optane PMEM 200 modules. This allows for insanely fast storage access – and to help you make the most of it, the system comes with not one but two dual-port Intel 100GbE network cards.

You can upgrade even further by going up to 26 SFF drives in total, plus eight NVMe drives, and the spacious 2U design allows for six free PCI-E Gen4 slots. It’s a magnificent hardware package, and while the £21,895 price tag won’t be within everyone’s budget, it’s superb value for what you get.

Read our full Broadberry CyberServe SP2 208-8I G3 review

HIGHLY COMMENDED: Dell EMC PowerEdge R750

Dell’s PowerEdge R750 comes in three versions – the R750xa is built for GPU-based workloads, while the R750xs is a cost-optimised version aimed at specific roles. The standard R750 is a great all-rounder though: the configuration we tested offered two 28-core 2GHz Xeon Scalable Gold 6330 CPUs and 1TB of RAM, upgradeable to a whopping 8TB using 256GB DIMMs. For storage you can choose between a 12-bay LFF backplane or a 16-bay SFF one, and add up to 24 NVMe SSDs. In short, there’s enough power and flexibility here for any business.

Read our full Dell EMC PowerEdge R750 review

Best storage array 2021

WINNER: HPE MSA 2060 Storage

With numerous hardware upgrades over the last generation, this is HPE’s fastest dedicated storage array ever. It’s also laden with powerful features: thin provisioning, snapshots and volume copies are all supported, along with striped SSD caches, RAID10, 5 and 6 options and HPE’s own MSA-DP+ array format, designed for improved performance and faster rebuild times.

The MSA 2060 even offers zero-configuration data tiering, automatically shunting data between regular SAS drives, fast solid-state storage and low-priority ML-SAS volumes according to usage. And it’s all configured and managed from a simple web portal, so there’s no need to be a storage expert to get the best from it.

Read our full HPE MSA 2060 Storage review

HIGHLY COMMENDED: Qnap TS-h2490FU QuTS Hero Edition

When performance is a priority, pure NVMe storage is the way to go. This impressive appliance can take up to 24 hot-plug U.2 drives, while Qnap’s 128-bit ZFS-based OS provides enterprise-class data integrity, with compression and deduplication options provided as standard. It’s all based on a powerful AMD EPYC processor, and it comes with a pair of dual-port 25GbE network cards, to ensure you can get the full performance from your storage.

Read our full Qnap TS-h2490FU QuTS Hero Edition review

Best NAS drive 2021

WINNER: Qnap TS-h973AX

Though it looks unassuming, Qnap’s TS-h973AX runs the company’s advanced QuTS hero OS, which offers an impressive range of native storage features. Those include fast, near-unlimited snapshots, transparent self-healing of data corruption and inline data deduplication and compression to make the most efficient use of your storage. Five LFF SATA bays plus four SFF bays provide plenty of room for expansion, while 10GbE and twin 2.5GbE network ports provide high-speed connections to the outside world.

In our tests the TS-h973AX provided fast read and write speeds, and there’s a whole library of apps to expand its capabilities, including backup and virtualisation tools. Costing just over £1,000 exc VAT for the diskless enclosure, it’s well within reach of smaller businesses.

Read our full Qnap TS-h973AX review

HIGHLY COMMENDED: Qnap TS-873A

Looking for a simple storage solution? The eight-bay TS-873A makes a great platform for Qnap’s lightweight, simple to manage QTS OS. Alternatively, for more advanced data-protection functions you can install the full QuTS hero OS and make use of all the same features as the TS-h973AX, above. Either way, it’ll run the full range of Qnap apps, and dual 2.5GbE ports help keep data flowing swiftly in and out.

Read our full Qnap TS-873A review

Best printer 2021

WINNER: Epson EcoTank ET-5880

Forget about overpriced cartridges – this A4 MFP uses bottled ink that works out to just 0.2p per mono page and 0.8p for colour. That alone will make it attractive to busy offices, but the ET-5880 has other strengths too, including a swish 10.9cm touchscreen, 802.11n wireless connectivity and excellent colour output. It comes with a pair of 250-sheet paper cassettes, so you won’t be continually restocking it, and the integrated scanner has its own 50-page duplex ADF.

The one caveat is a print speed of 25ppm in standard quality mode: that’s not exactly slow, but it’s unexceptional for a modern office printer. Even so, the Epson’s user-friendliness and phenomenally low running costs make it our top choice for 2021.

Read our full Epson EcoTank ET-5880 review

HIGHLY COMMENDED: Kyocera Ecosys

This freestanding laser MFP won’t suit the smallest offices, but it offers a 35ppm print speed and a wide range of downloadable apps to extend its printing and scanning functions. It’s easy to operate, with a big 7in touchscreen, a range of mobile apps and a clear web-based management console. The clincher is the price: the basic model with wired networking and a single 250-page sheet feeder costs just £696 exc VAT, and low-cost consumables work out to a very reasonable 1p per mono page.

Read our full Kyocera Ecosys M6235cidn review

Best scanner 2021

WINNER: Fujitsu ScanSnap iX1600

This desktop scanner has a great set of features, including integrated Wi-Fi, a 50-sheet ADF, double-sided scanning and a 4.3in colour touchscreen. It’s fast too: we were impressed to see it rip through our pile of test documents at 43ppm, creating 200dpi scans that were perfectly clear and clean enough for OCR and archival.

Even better, this hardware is partnered by one of the best software suites around. You can scan to a huge range of applications and cloud services, send scans directly to an email address or beam them to a mobile device. For anyone who needs to scan and share documents in a digital or cloud-first environment, the Fujitsu ScanSnap iX1600 is a terrific choice.

Read our full Fujitsu ScanSnap iX1600 review

HIGHLY COMMENDED: Canon imageFormula DR-S130

With its output tray folded away the DR-S130 takes up barely any more desk space than a sheet of A4. Yet it scans at a swift 30ppm, and thanks to Canon’s CaptureOnTouch V4 Pro software it can perform all the same scan functions as much pricier, bulkier models. You can set up profiles for different job types, run single- and double-sided scans, perform OCR and save the output in your choice of format and location. The only thing it can’t do is scan directly to cloud services, but for most individuals and SMBs it’ll fit the bill admirably.

Read our full Canon imageFormula DR-S130 review

Best monitor 2021

WINNER: Dell UltraSharp 25 USB-C

We don’t see a lot of 25in monitors, but the format works well for desktop productivity, and the Dell UltraSharp lives up to its name with a crisp 2,560 x 1,440 resolution. It also delivers excellent coverage of both the sRGB and DCI-P3 colour spaces, with an HDR400 certification for extended-range colour.

The final trump card is connectivity: the USB Type-C connector can handle both incoming video and outgoing power, so you can hook your laptop up to the big screen and charge it at the same time. It’s also possible to daisy-chain a second display via the DisplayPort connector, or to swivel the panel round through 90º and work in portrait mode. In short, it’s one of the cleverest monitors we’ve seen.

Read our full Dell UltraSharp 25 USB-C review

HIGHLY COMMENDED: Acer ConceptD CP5271UV

The CP5271UV is an exceptionally versatile monitor. It offers custom display modes for print editing, video and games, and also supports high-end features including HDR600 for deep-colour content, dynamic refresh rates up to 170Hz and an incandescent peak brightness of 480cd/m2. It makes a great office monitor too, with integrated gigabit Ethernet and four USB 3.1 ports. At £667 exc VAT it’s considerably more expensive than your typical desktop display, but if you're in the market for a high-end screen it’s a steal.

Read our full Acer ConceptD CP5271UV review

Best endpoint security suite 2021

WINNER: Sophos Intercept X Advanced

There’s a lot of hype around artificial intelligence, but it does have real applications: Sophos’ Intercept X suite uses machine-learning techniques to recognise malware and neutralise zero-day threats. It also includes a full range of traditional protections, defeating ransomware by intercepting encryption attacks and silently restoring the original file, and preventing data leaks by blocking the transmission of certain types of information.

The Advanced subscription adds an analysis centre, where you can forensically review attempted attacks, allowing you to identify and plug the gaps in your armour. It’s easy to deploy and manage too: a central web console lets you email out installer links to all clients, and then administer policies and settings for the whole site.

Read our full Sophos Intercept X Advanced review

HIGHLY COMMENDED: Kaspersky Endpoint Security Cloud Plus

Kaspersky’s highly flexible licensing lets you protect workstations, laptops, servers and mobile devices all within a single subscription. As well as blocking viruses and intrusion attempts, the software can watch over your network for suspicious activity, and manage Windows Updates from a central portal. The premium Plus subscription adds the Security for Microsoft 365 component, which integrates into Exchange Online, OneDrive, SharePoint Online and Teams, providing monitoring and protection for your services as well as your endpoints.

Read our full Kaspersky Endpoint Security Cloud Plus review

Best antivirus suite 2021

WINNER: Kaspersky Internet Security

Kaspersky is no stranger to our awards, and this latest version of its security suite shows why – in multiple independent tests it scored perfect 100% protection scores without a single false positive. Other notable features include browser protection, ransomware blocking, defences against webcam hijacking and even a fully featured firewall.

Do you need to pay for this type of protection? It’s true that Windows’ built-in security modules are nowadays very effective on their own. However, Kaspersky is much easier to configure, especially when it comes to customising firewall rules. It also has less of an impact on system performance, which makes the modest £15/yr subscription fee easy to swallow.

Read our full Kaspersky Internet Security review

HIGHLY COMMENDED: Avast Antivirus Free

Avast is our favourite free antivirus solution for several reasons. First, it does a great job of blocking malware: independent labs have found its protection on par with Microsoft Defender and ahead of several paid-for suites. What’s more, it’ll run on older editions of Windows – which is ideal if you still have legacy machines running Windows 7 or 8.1 that can’t be upgraded. You do have to put up with a few in-application adverts for Avast’s paid-for products, but if you can’t use Windows’ built-in protections – or just don’t want to – then Avast Antivirus Free makes a lightweight and effective alternative.

Read our full Avast Antivirus Free review

If versatility is what you’re after in a business NAS, then Qnap’s TS-h1886XU-RP has you covered. This 2U rack system can house up to 18 drives, via 12 front-facing hot-swap bays and six rear SFF bays, and has plenty of connectivity options, in the form of quad Gigabit Ethernet ports plus dual 10GbE connectors.

The appliance even offers two operating systems: on initial setup, the quick-start wizard prompts you to choose between Qnap’s nimble QTS OS and the advanced QuTS hero OS. While the latter is more demanding, the TS-h1886XU-RP has the resources to match it: the price above includes 32GB of DDR4 RAM, which is enough to fully enable inline deduplication and get top performance from the 10GbE ports. The only catch is that you’re limited to a 1TB SSD cache; to increase this to 4TB, you’ll need to upgrade to the maximum 128GB.

QTS doesn’t have all the high-end features of QuTS, but it can support a 4TB cache out of the box – and, unlike QuTS, it supports Qnap’s Qtier 2 data-migration feature.

Whichever path you choose, the user experience is very similar. The two systems present almost identical web consoles, with 130 downloadable apps for QTS and 144 for QuTS. All the key backup apps are available for both OSes, including Hybrid Backup Sync 3, Qsync Central and HybridMount – plus Hyper Data Protector for VMware and Hyper-V systems.

What’s more, both platforms give excellent performance. The appliance is driven by a quad-core 2.6GHz Intel Xeon D-1622 CPU, and three vacant PCI-E slots offer plenty of expansion options: they’ll take multi-Gigabit, 10GbE, 25GbE and 40GbE network adapters, or 16/32Gbits/sec Fibre Channel cards.

Qnap recommends installing QuTS on SSDs, so for testing we used a pair of mirrored 960GB Micron SFF SSDs. For data-storage duties, we fitted six Toshiba 18TB MG09 SATA hard disks and created a massive 79TB RAID5 storage pool. Subsequently switching to QTS was a bit of an operation, as it requires you to back up all your data and reinitialise the appliance. However, QTS doesn’t require SSDs for its system pool, so we just created a single pool from the Toshiba drives - and the results were illuminating.

For 10GbE NAS performance, there’s nothing to choose between the two operating systems: under both systems, Iometer recorded read and write rates a shade over 9Gbits/sec, which is what we’d expect from a business-class appliance.

It was the same story in our file-copying tests: when we dragged a 25GB file to and from a network share, both OSes averaged around 7.6Gbits/sec for both reads and writes, while our 22.4GB test folder was copied at a speedy 2.4Gbits/sec.

To test IP SANs, we used a 1TB iSCSI target mapped to our test server over a dual 10GbE MPIO link. Again, QTS and QuTS delivered near-identical performance, with sequential read and write speeds between 17Gbits/sec and 18Gbits/sec. Moving to random read operations saw respective speeds of 18.5Gbits/sec and 18.1Gbits/sec.

We did see one big difference, however. QuTS uses Qnap’s ARC (adaptive read cache) and ZIL (ZFS intent log) features, which enable much faster random writes over iSCSI: QTS achieved rates of only 0.6Gbits/sec, while QuTS shot ahead at an average of 17.3Gbits/sec. Adding a dual SSD cache to QTS improved performance, but only to 4Gbits/sec.

Note, too, that QuTS supports triple mirroring and RAID-TP (triple parity) to protect against three drive failures – something QTS can’t match. And when creating NAS shares, QuTS gives you the option to enable native compression and deduplication to save space, plus WORM policies to prevent data being tampered with.

With its dual personality, the Qnap’s TS-h1886XU-RP will appeal to a wide range of businesses. Both OS options perform well and offer a wide range of features, and its clever 18-bay design is ideal for SSD-accelerated storage services with plenty of room to expand.

Qnap TS-h1886XU-RP specifications

SMBs that want an affordable all-Flash array (AFA) will find Qnap’s TS-h3088XU-RP could be just what they’re looking for. While SAS and NVMe SSD AFAs deliver in the performance stakes, they’re painfully expensive to populate but this rack appliance keeps your outlay at a more manageable level by supporting lower-cost SATA SSDs.

What’s more, the TS-h3088XU-RP has room for up to 30 SSDs, making it one of the highest capacity 2U AFAs on the market. It has plenty of power on tap, too; the model on review sports a 3.3GHz six-core Xeon W-1250 CPU, partnered by 32GB of DDR4 memory.

Those that want even more performance can opt for a higher-spec version driven by a 3.4GHz eight-core Xeon W-1270. This also doubles base memory to 64GB, and both models support up to 128GB using four standard 32GB DIMMs.

Qnap TS-h3088XU-RP review: Hardware features

The appliance achieves this impressive storage density by presenting 24 standard SSF bays at the front and employing two triple-drive cages at the rear. They’re all hot-swappable, support SATA HDDs as well as SSDs and are all connected to the same centrally mounted drive backplane.

The TS-h3088XU-RP is ready for some serious network action as along with four embedded 2.5GbE multi-Gig ports, the price includes a Qnap dual-port 25GbE SFP28 PCI-E card. Further expansion is possible via two free PCI-E slots - but be careful what you put in them as using the second X4 slot will drop the primary slot with the 25GbE card from x8 down to x4 speeds.

Qnap has also aimed this appliance at media editors; the Xeon W CPUs have an integrated Intel UHD Graphics P630 GPU, which supports real-time video transcoding and feeds 30Hz 4K video through to the rear HDMI port, although this is the 1.4b variety and not the higher-bandwidth 2.0 version.

Power redundancy is handled by a pair of 550W hot-plug PSUs with three internal cold-swap fans managing all cooling. Air shrouds on each one push air through the rear SFF cages and over the CPU and we measured acceptable sound levels of 63dB from one metre in front.

Qnap TS-h3088XU-RP review: QTS vs QuTS hero

The TS-h3088XU-RP supports Qnap’s QTS and QuTS hero OSes, and you can choose which one to install from the QFinder deployment app. Most businesses will undoubtedly go for the latter as it offers superior enterprise-class data protection features including ZFS copy-on-write for fast, near unlimited snapshots plus inline data deduplication and compression.

Self-healing of data corruption is handled by end-to-end checksums while replication to remote appliances gets a speed boost as it only sends changed blocks. Along with the usual RAID suspects, you can choose from triple parity RAID to protect against three drive failures or triple mirroring which stores identical copies of data on three drives.

NAS share data can be protected with one of two WORM (write once read many) policies. The Enterprise policy allows a protected folder to be deleted but stops anything in it from being individually modified or removed while the stronger Compliance policy blocks folder deletion and only allows it to be removed by deleting the entire storage pool.

Qnap TS-h3088XU-RP review: QuTS hero apps

Whichever OS you choose, you’ll find both easy to use as they offer almost identical web browser interfaces. There’s little between them for apps either, and we counted no less than 111 available for QuTS hero. The standard iSCSI & Fibre Channel app is used to create IP SANs and you can apply thick or thin provisioning, deduplication and compression.

Manual and scheduled snapshots for NAS volumes and iSCSI LUNs are run from the Storage & Snapshots app and can be scheduled as often as every 5 minutes. The SnapSync feature supports NAS shares and iSCSI LUNs and replicates data to remote QuTS appliances using block-level replication run to a schedule or in real time.

QuTS hero also provides plenty of backup apps such as Hybrid Backup Sync (HBS) 3 and Hyper Data Protector for protecting VMware and Hyper-V virtualized environments. Virtualization is on the menu too, with the Container Station, Ubuntu Linux Station and Virtualization Station apps all present.

The HybridDesk Station app brings the HDMI port into play. With an HD TV, keyboard and mouse connected, we used its desktop interface to access the various plug-ins which included direct access to Chrome, Firefox, Skype and Facebook while the HybridDesk Station allows the appliance to be managed locally.

Qnap TS-h3088XU-RP review: 25GbE performance

For performance testing, we installed two 1.92TB Micron 5200 SATA SSDs in the rear carriers to use as a mirrored QuTS system pool and loaded twelve 500GB Western Digital Red SA500 SSDs in the front bays and created a RAID6 array for general data storage.

Starting with IP SANs, we created a 1TB iSCSI target and mapped it over a dual 25GbE MPIO connection to a Dell EMC PowerEdge T640 Xeon Scalable server running Windows Server 2019. Performance is impressive with Iometer recording raw sequential read and write rates of 35.5Gbits/sec and 32.6Gbits/sec with random operations returning 34.6Gbits/sec and 30.1Gbits/sec.

I/O throughput is up there too, as 4KB Iometer block sizes delivered sequential read and write rates of 246,500 and 226,005 IOPS. Swapping to random operations saw equally good read and write throughputs of 242,700 and 147,000 IOPS.

NAS performance is nothing to sniff at either, with a share mapped to the server over a single 25GbE connection delivering sequential read and write rates of 23.1Gbits/sec and 22.6Gbits/sec and random rates of 23.1Gbits/sec and 20.3Gbits/sec. The share also returned sequential and random read and write throughputs of 128,400 and 121,900 IOPS and 128,010 and 79,000 IOPS.

Qnap TS-h3088XU-RP review: Verdict

With prices for a diskless unit starting at less than £4,200, the TS-h3088XU-RP offers a very affordable alternative to costly SAS/NVMe AFAs and it won’t be beaten for sheer SSD density. Qnap’s QuTS hero OS offers great enterprise-class data protection features and the inclusion of a 25GbE adapter card adds extra value while NAS and IP SAN performance over 25GbE is very good.

Qnap TS-h3088XU-RP specifications

Qnap was the first vendor to equip its NAS appliances with Intel’s Xeon E server-grade CPUs and it now brings this processing power to its enterprise-class QuTS hero-powered rack models. The TS-hx83XU series offers a choice of three drive capacities ranging from 12 to 24 bays, and first of these is the entry-level TS-h1283XU-RP.

This 2U 12-bay appliance has plenty of power on tap, with a speedy 3.4GHz six-core Xeon E-2236 in the driving seat partnered by 32GB of ECC DDR4 memory expandable to 128GB. Network port permutations are excellent as the appliance includes quad embedded Gigabit and two dual-port PCI-E expansion cards providing a choice of 10GbE RJ-45 and SFP+ fibre ports.

The TS-h1283XU-RP is massively expandable - even with the two 10GbE cards in residence, it still has two more free PCI-E slots. Along with a choice of 10GbE, 25GbE and 40GbE network cards plus fibre channel adapters, it accepts Qnap’s multi-port SAS3 expansion cards allowing up to sixteen 16-bay TL-R1620Sep-RP disk shelves to be daisy-chained in fault tolerant links.

Qnap TS-h1283XU-RP review: QuTS features

Qnap’s QuTS hero is a 128-bit ZFS-based operating system which delivers a range of valuable enterprise-class data integrity and protection features. End-to-end checksums offer transparent self-healing of data corruption, ZFS copy-on-write provides fast, near-unlimited snapshots for NAS shares and iSCSI LUNs, and it introduces triple mirroring. This stores identical copies of data on three drives and triple parity RAID (RAID-TP) to protect against up to three drive failures.

NAS share data can be protected from unauthorized deletion or modification by applying one of two WORM (write once read many) policies, and QuTS hero can also make big storage savings with compression and in-line deduplication. However, there’s a good reason why the TS-h1283XU-RP comes with a base 32GB of memory: the QuTS deduplication requires a minimum of 16GB, the 10GbE ports need at least 32GB to get the best performance out of them and up to 1TB SSD cache sizes are supported.

On the other hand, the appliance’s browser-based quick start wizard offers a choice between QuTS hero and Qnap’s standard QTS OS, if you wish. This is less demanding for memory but doesn’t offer the same level of data protection features as QuTS and only supports EXT4 volumes.

Qnap TS-h1283XU-RP review: 10GbE performance

Qnap recommends SSDs for the best system pool performance, so we loaded QuTS on dual mirrored 960GB Micron SFF SSDs. For data pool duties, we chose six Toshiba 18TB MG09 SATA HDDs and created a big 79TB RAID5 storage pool.

With a NAS share mapped over a 10GbE fibre link to a Dell EMC PowerEdge T640 tower running Windows Server 2019, we saw Iometer report great sequential read and write rates of 9.3Gbits/sec and 9.2Gbits/sec. Real world performance was equally good with drag and drop copies of a 25GB test file returning read and write rates of 7.7Gbits/sec and 8Gbits/sec, while securing a 22.4GB folder with 10,500 small files averaged a speedy 2.5Gbits/sec.

IP SAN performance is up there too, with a 1TB iSCSI target returning top Iometer sequential read and write rates of 9.3Gbits/sec and 9.2Gbits/sec. We then created a dual 10GbE MPIO link to the target and recorded average Iometer read and write rates of 18.5Gbits/sec and 17.4Gbits/sec.

QuTS scores over QTS for its more efficient handling of random operations as its ARC (adaptive read cache) and ZIL (ZFS intent log) features negate the need for SSD caches. We confirmed this with our dual MPIO iSCSI target, which returned random read and write speeds of 18.4Gbits/sec and 17.1Gbits/sec.

Qnap TS-h1283XU-RP review: Data protection

The QuTS web interface is virtually identical to Qnap’s standard QTS version and presents a shallow learning curve. You’ll come across many of its data protection features when creating NAS shares as the wizard offers options for thick or thin provisioning, encryption, compression, deduplication and WORM policies.

For WORM, you can set a retention period in days, months or years, while the Enterprise policy allows a protected folder to be deleted but stops anything in it from being individually modified or removed. The Compliance policy is tougher, as the only way to delete the folder is to remove the parent storage pool.

Snapshot creation procedures are the same as for QTS; you choose a folder or iSCSI LUN, apply a schedule and decide how many to retain. Smart snapshots save space as they will only occur if the data has changed since the last one and data can be swiftly restored using the File Station 5 app to browse NAS snapshots.

Qnap TS-h1283XU-RP review: App choices

App support is excellent as we checked the App Center and counted 113 packages available for the TS-h1283XU-RP. All key backup and file syncing apps are present and include Hybrid Backup Sync (HBS) 3, Qsync Central and HybridMount, plus Hyper Data Protector which protects VMware and Hyper-V virtualized environments.

Boxafe provides NAS-based backup services for G Suite and Office 365 cloud accounts, while the Malware Remover keeps your on-appliance data safe. The appliance can also host virtual machines via the Container Station, Ubuntu Linux Station and Virtualization Station apps.

Snapshots can be replicated to other QuTS appliances for additional protection too. The freshly released SnapSync service is accessed from the Storage & Snapshots app and synchronises snapshots to remote QuTS appliances, either according to a set schedule or in real time.

Qnap TS-h1283XU-RP review: Verdict

Qnap’s TS-h1283XU-RP has what it takes to satisfy businesses that want a solid combination of storage performance, data protection features and expansion potential. The choice of two OSes adds a lot of flexibility and although the asking price for a diskless unit may seem high, bear in mind this includes a fast Xeon E-2236 CPU, 32GB of memory and a quartet of 10GbE data ports.

Qnap TS-h1283XU-RP specifications

No two IT infrastructures are alike, and there’s no such thing as a ‘one size fits all’ solution. Qnap’s eight-bay TS-873A desktop appliance arguably comes close, though, with the flexibility to fit a range of business needs.

The TS-873A is all about choice: on first boot you’ll be asked whether you want to install Qnap’s standard QTS operating system or the more advanced QuTS hero platform. It’s worth thinking carefully about which you pick, as there are significant differences between the two, and if you later change your mind then the only way to switch is to back up your data and completely reinitialise the unit.

For SMBs seeking a simple storage solution, QTS is the obvious choice. It provides all of the key services you would expect from a NAS appliance, and works with every app Qnap has to offer. It will also fit happily within the base 8GB of DDR4 memory that comes preinstalled on the TS-873A.

If you want enterprise-class data security and protection features, QuTS is the way to go. It’s a 128-bit ZFS-based OS which supports copy-on-write for fast, near-unlimited snapshots, as well as end-to-end checksums for error recovery and inline deduplication and compression, which can offer big storage savings.

QuTS adds support for triple-parity arrays too, meaning your data is protected even if three drives fail at once. What’s more, WORM policies help ensure your data archives can’t be tampered with or deleted. The only catch is that QuTS is a more demanding platform: deduplication requires a minimum of 16GB of memory to function, and if you plan to use a 10GbE connection you’ll want to boost this to 32GB to avoid resource bottlenecks.

Aside from that, you don’t need to worry about horsepower – there’s a meaty quad-core 2.2GHz AMD Ryzen V1500B CPU in the driving seat, and storage options are versatile too. The eight front-facing SATA drive bays support both mechanical disks and SSDs, and are accompanied by two internal M.2 NVMe SSD slots. At the rear, dual 2.5GbE ports provide a nice performance boost over a regular Gigabit Ethernet connection, and if you need more speed than that, a pair of PCIe slots sit ready for 10GbE cards or other upgrades.

Our review unit came loaded with 32GB of RAM, so we started by installing QuTS on a pair of mirrored 960GB Micron SFF SSDs (QuTS prefers these for optimum system pool performance, whereas QTS doesn’t care). For data storage, we used three 14TB Seagate IronWolf Pro hard disks, and were up and running with a 25TB RAID5 storage pool in around five minutes.

For testing, we also slotted in a Broadcom 10GbE card, and connected to the NAS from a Dell PowerEdge T640 Xeon Scalable tower running Windows Server 2019. The results were just what you would hope to see: Iometer reported read and write speeds of 9.2Gbits/sec and 7.8Gbits/sec respectively.

Real-world performance was similarly strong. Copies of a 25GB test file between the NAS and server were completed at average read and write rates of 8.5Gbits/sec and 4.5Gbits/sec, while our backup test was dispatched at a creditable 2.5Gbits/sec. IP SAN speeds are up there too, with a 500GB target delivering read and write rates of 9.2Gbits/sec and 8.7Gbits/sec; configuring a dual 10GbE MPIO link boosted these to 12.5Gbits/sec and 10.6Gbits/sec.

We then tried the same tests under QTS. After reinitialising the appliance (which took around 20 minutes), we were pleased to find that performance was as good as with QuTS. In fact, QTS delivered slightly better write performance in our NAS and IP SAN tests, but not enough to make any significant difference.

Whichever OS you choose, Qnap’s software support is excellent, with 109 apps available for QuTS and 123 for QTS. All backup and file-syncing apps are available for download, including Hybrid Backup Sync 3, Qsync Central and HybridMount, as well as Hyper Data Protector which protects VMware and Hyper-V virtual environments.

It adds up to a very impressive and flexible desktop NAS. If you want to get the best from QuTS, you’ll need to upgrade the RAM, but both OSes deliver great performance, and those dual PCIe slots offer plenty of expansion potential.

Qnap TS-873A specifications

Qnap's TS-h973AX might not have the snappiest name in the desktop NAS market, but it makes a big impression in other ways, offering enterprise-class data security and protection on an SMB budget.

Much of that is thanks to Qnap's ZFS-based QuTS hero operating system, and its impressive range of native storage features. ZFS copy-on-write provides fast, near-unlimited snapshots, while end-to-end checksums offer transparent self-healing of data corruption and inline data deduplication and compression help you make the most efficient use of your storage.

QuTS goes above and beyond when it comes to RAID provision, too. Alongside the usual range of parity and mirroring options, it lets you create triple-parity arrays to protect against three drive failures, or use triple mirroring to store identical copies of your data on three drives. Data can also be protected from tampering by applying WORM (write once, read many) policies.

The appliance is powered by a 2.2GHz AMD Ryzen V1500B CPU, and we opted for the model with 32GB of DDR4 memory. You can save a bit of cash by choosing the cheaper 8GB version, but be aware that Qnap's deduplication service requires a minimum of 16GB to function.

The TS-h973AX is well endowed for a desktop unit, with five main LFF SATA hot-swap drive bays and four SFF bays below, the top two of which support SATA or U.2 NVMe SSDs. Around the back there's an embedded 10GBase-T port, plus two 2.5GbE sockets to play with.

While the QuTS hero software is laden with advanced features, the learning curve is gentle as it looks and feels very similar to the standard QTS firmware. That said, we spotted one difference right away: our three 14TB Seagate IronWolf NAS HDDs were assembled into a 24TB RAID5 storage pool in five minutes, while the job could have taken a day under QTS.

There are a lot more differences under the surface. For example, when creating NAS shares, the wizard offers a generous range of options for thick or thin provisioning, compression, deduplication, encryption and WORM. The latter comes in two flavours: if you pick the Enterprise WORM policy then you can delete folders within the share, but not modify or remove individual items. The tougher Compliance policy doesn't let you change or delete anything, short of completely removing the storage pool.

IP SANs can be set up in the standard iSCSI & Fibre Channel app, and you can again choose thick or thin provisioning for LUNs, along with deduplication, compression and other options. The Storage & Snapshots app can be used to create both NAS and iSCSI snapshots, either manually or according to your chosen schedule.

There are plenty of other apps to explore; we counted more than 130 either preinstalled or available to download, including Hybrid Backup Sync 3, Qsync Central and HybridMount, as well as Hyper Data Protector, which protects VMware and Hyper-V VMs.

The cherry on top is performance. With the appliance connected to our Dell T640 Xeon Scalable Windows Server 2019 host over 10GbE, we mapped a drive and saw sequential read and write speeds of 9.3Gbits/sec and 7.2Gbits/sec respectively, as measured by Iometer. Real-world performance is similarly impressive: copies of a 25GB test file between the NAS and server were completed at read and write rates of 8.7Gbits/sec and 4.4Gbits/sec respectively, while our data backup set was transferred at a very creditable 2.5Gbits/sec.

The TS-h973AX crams an awful lot of storage into its modestly sized casing, and delivers an impressive set of features and great all-round performance. Despite all that, it's very affordable for SMBs – making this our top-choice desktop NAS.

Qnap TS-h973AX specifications

Qnap's QTS storage software has traditionally offered a good choice of performance-enhancing caching facilities and the TS-1886XU-RP is designed to take full advantage of them. This 2U rack NAS appliance has 12 standard LFF/SFF SATA drive bays at the front and round the back and you'll find 6 more SFF bays specifically for SSDs.

This makes the TS-1886XU-RP very versatile as with 18 bays up for grabs, you can dedicate the front ones to high-capacity LFF SATA drives and use the rear ones to present high-speed storage. They can be used for read or read/write SSD caches to accelerate I/O throughput or as a high-performance tier for Qnap's Qtier 2 data migration feature.

Qsan's family of 18-bay 2U rack XCubeNAS models offer strong competition and the closest in terms of price parity is the XN5012R. Two of its six SFF bays do support NVMe SSDs and it offers great enterprise-class data protection features but we found the TS-1886XU-RP delivers a number of key advantages.

Qnap TS-1886XU-RP review: Hardware and expansion

The appliance has a quad-core 2.6GHz Intel Xeon D-1622 CPU in the driving seat which is over two years younger than the XN5012R's dual-core 2.9GHz Celeron G3930. Another advantage is the base 8GB of DDR4 ECC memory in the TS-1886XU-RP can be upgraded to a massive 128GB.

Network options are superior too; Qnap presents a quartet of embedded Gigabit ports and the price includes a dual-port 10GbE SFP+ fibre PCI-E card. Three spare PCI-E slots are available and along with support for multi-Gigabit, 10GbE, 25GbE and 40GbE network adapters, the appliance accepts industry-standard 16/32Gbps Fibre Channel cards – a feature no other vendor currently offers.

The slots can also be used with Qnap's SAS-12G2E dual-port expansion card which costs around £300 and allows up to eight 12-bay or 16-bay SAS3 external shelves to be connected. The other option is to use the appliance's dual USB 3 ports to connect Qnap's SATA rack expansion shelves.

Value looks even better, since the appliance also comes with dual 550W hot-plug PSUs included in the price. Internal design is very tidy making upgrades a cinch, although we found noise levels at close quarters of 64dB from the three cold-swap cooling fans somewhat intrusive.

Qnap TS-1886XU-RP review: Cache benefits

We focused on SSD caching performance and installed three 16TB Seagate IronWolf NAS drives with four enterprise-class 1.92TB Micron 5200 Max SATA SSDs fitted at the rear. After creating a RAID5 array with the IronWolfs, we used the QTS Storage & Snapshots app to create an SSD cache and promptly ran up against restrictions imposed by the appliance's memory.

The base 8GB of memory limits cache sizes to 2TB so we could only create a dual SSD mirrored cache with the Microns, as RAID10, 5 and 6 arrays would be too large. QTS supports a maximum 4TB cache size which will require a memory upgrade to at least 16GB.

For IP SAN testing, we added a second dual-port 10GbE card to the appliance, created a 1TB iSCSI target and presented it over a quad MPIO link to a Dell PowerEdge T640 Xeon Scalable server running Windows Server 2019. Caching has no impact on sequential read performance as in both cases, we recorded a top speed of 4,500MB/sec.

Sequential write performance improved noticeably with the SSD cache boosting throughput by 34% to 2,440MB/sec. Random read throughput saw no significant improvements but random write performance received a massive 668% increase to 522MB/sec.

Dropping the Iometer block size to 4KB revealed a similar story where the biggest improvements came with random write operations. Without caching, we recorded a mere 1,300 IOPS which the SSD cache increased hugely to 55,400 IOPS.

Qnap TS-1886XU-RP review: Tiering and backup

Qnap's Qtier 2 feature is also accessed from the QTS Storage & Snapshots app and this latest version allows you to upgrade an existing storage pool with an SSD tier. You can modify the tier whenever you want and delete it where the data is flushed back onto the standard HDD tier.

A wizard helps create a high-performance tier and unlike standard caching, there are no tier size limitations. It also offers enterprise-class migration services as the automatic setting moves data between the tiers during periods of light storage pool usage based on recorded usage.

You can create a manual daily schedule that determines when migration will occur and apply tiering on demand to specify which NAS shares and iSCSI LUNs are included. The File Station app can also be used to see which NAS shares have tiering applied and to directly access their settings.

Whether it's tiered or not, appliance data still needs to be backed up and Qnap beats Qsan hands down as it offers far more apps. The free HBS (Hybrid Backup Sync) 3 app is Qnap's star player, which helps you create a 3-2-1 appliance protection strategy in as few as four clicks.

It uses Storage Spaces to define multiple backup destinations and file version management provides valuable protection against ransomware attacks. Qnap's QuDedupe feature reduces backup space requirements by performing deduplication and storing the reduced data set and hash tables as proprietary files at the destination.

We think Synology's Active Backup Suite is still the one to beat for features but Qnap makes further inroads as it is developing a separate backup app for protecting virtualized environments. Currently in beta testing, the Hyper Data Protector (HDP) app supports VMware and Hyper-V hosts and can manage backup schedules for securing selected VMs to a repository on the appliance.

Qnap TS-1886XU-RP review: Verdict

The TS-1886XU-RP is ideally suited to demanding workloads that will benefit from SSD caching or tiering and our tests show it can make considerable improvements to HDD random write operations. Qsan's XCubeNAS appliances offer a similar hybrid storage arrangement but the Qnap alternative is a lot better value, the QTS software provides a superior range of apps and the appliance is covered by a more generous 5-year warranty.

Qnap TS-1886XU-RP specifications