QNAP KMU / SMB - Thunderbolt NAS

QNAP really has delivered the best of both Worlds with its Thunderbolt-NAS drives: you get the potential speed of a directly-connected SSD drive that’s quick enough to actually edit video from, but coupled with the benefits of a traditional NAS, including large shared storage pools, protection against disk failure and automated online backup. The TVS-472XT hits a sweet-spot too, with a compact four-bay enclosure that cherry-picks the best of the connectivity of the higher-end models without being excessive for most smaller operations. You get a single 10 Gigabit ethernet port and twin Thunderbolt 3 ports, allowing you to directly connect three devices for very fast access, and if you’re lucky enough to have a 10Gbe network switch, the Thunderbolt ports also act as bridges, allowing suitably-equipped Macs or PCs to connect at maximum speed without splashing out on expensive 10Gbe adapters. Twin NVMe M.2 ports and upgradable RAM also provide easy routes for increasing performance for certain applications. Meanwhile a wealth of USB 3.1 ports allow quick connection to external drives - including a handy front-mounted port for easy backup - while an HDMI 2.0 port lets you connect the unit directly to a TV for media streaming in 4k up to 60p. QNAP rounds it all off with a powerful software suite that makes it easy to run media servers, security cameras or automated backups to cloud services. As someone who’s used traditional NAS units for years, I was already won-over by the traditional network aspects, but the direct Thunderbolt connection transforms its flexibility. Here’s a drive I can use for both traditional network storage and sharing as well as super-fast direct access similar in speed to a quick external drive. I can highly recommend it to any photographer or video creator, where the only real questions remaining are whether to go for the four, six or eight bay model and what drives to populate it with.

The QNAP TVS-472XT has so many features it can practically do anything besides being a plain data storage device, but such capability increases cost. If you don't need all these bells and whistles, you can get a Thunderbolt 3 DAS for considerably less, though you may find the number of clients a DAS can accommodate limiting. Unfortunately, even less well-known NAS/DAS servers with Thunderbolt 3 ports are expensive, such as the TerraMaster D5 I previously reviewed.

Das TBS-h574TX ist eine richtige Powerkiste. In der Kompaktheit ist das NAS schnell mitzunehmen, mit entsprechend großen SSDs liefert es Dank der Bandbreite, Thunderbolt 4 und der schnellen CPU eine hervorragende Leistung. Flexibel ist es zudem aufgrund von QuTS Hero ebenso, theoretisch könnte man sogar VMs mit den gebotenen 16 GB DDR4 recht gut auf dem NAS laufen lassen. Es ist leise und verbraucht nicht allzu viel Strom, ist dabei aber durch die Anbindung über 10GBit-Ethernet oder Thunderbolt 4 pfeilschnell. Letztendlich sieht es in der silber-grauen Farbe auch schick aus und ist so kompakt, dass man es auch mal für mobile Zwecke mitnehmen kann. In unserer Konfiguration mit der schnelleren CPU wird für das TBS-h574TX ein Kaufpreis von ca. 1.959 Euro fällig. Hinzu kommen fünf SSDs, in unserem Fall fünf 4 TB fassende KC3000 von Kingston. Diese liegen bei einem Stückpreis von ca. 370 Euro, insofern liegt man bei ungefähr 3.800 Euro für das komplette NAS-Setup und erhält dafür knapp 14,4 TB Kapazität im RAID 5. Das ist natürlich ein Preis-Leistungs-Verhältnis fernab der üblichen Festplatten-NAS-Konfigurationen, wo man mit einer 4-TB-Festplatte für 100 Euro und einem günstigen 4-Bay-NAS ähnliches schon für unter 1.000 Euro realisieren kann. Wie immer ist es jedoch eine Anwendungsfrage, ob sich so ein Kaufpreis tatsächlich lohnt. Wer Videoschnitt direkt über Thunderbolt 4 am TBS-h574TX betreiben will und das NAS vielleicht als kompakte Storage-Powerkiste auch mit zum Kunden nehmen will, um mobil damit zu arbeiten, der wird sich über Zeitersparnisse und den Komfort freuen - und plötzlich sieht der Kaufpreis gar nicht mehr so schlimm aus. Für den Endanwender zu Hause ist das NAS aber wohl eher überdimensioniert. Für Kreative "zu Ende gedacht" wäre dann allerdings vielleicht noch ein Cardreader im SD-Format sinnvoll, um die Shooting-Ergebnisse direkt auf das NAS zu übertragen. Und als Enthusiast könnte man sich auch eine volle PCIe-Anbindung der NVME-SSDs wünschen.

The QNAP TBS-h574TX is a neat little NAS and offers excellent features for creative professionals. The peculiar choice to use E1.S drives makes this NAS pretty flexible in terms of storage and, dare I say, a bit future-proofed. EDSFF is where a lot of flash-based storage is going, and while M.2 is by no means “dead,” it is no longer the primary focus for many enterprise storage manufacturers. It makes the longevity of this NAS just a bit longer as capacities will likely continue to increase for the E1.S form factor. It also makes up for the lack of PCIe expandability, which isn’t practical in this small chassis.

This certainly isn’t the NAS for everyone, and if you’re just at home wanting some backups, and somewhere to dump your Plex server for a few movies, it’s complete overkill. However, suppose like us you need to move massive files between multiple devices for content creation, be that game development, video editing or music production. In that case, it can be a very powerful tool indeed. The biggest benefit here, as far as I can see, is the 10GbE networking. When you combine that with the blazing-fast speeds that are possible on either M.2 or E1.S drives, you can far exceed the performance of more traditional 3.5″ drive NAS configurations. With traditional HDD you need to use RAID5 with 10 drives just to get to around 900-1000mbps transfer speeds, however, with M.2 you can use relatively cheaper NVMe drives without RAID, and still get even higher speeds. While we only used 1TB drives you can go much more beyond that on M.2 and E1.S with 4TB and sometimes 8TB drives being viable options if you’ve got deep enough pockets for them. Furthermore, the new E1.S drives are built bigger than M.2 drives and allow for more robust feature sets, that can further enhance your NAS experience. With support for a range of RAID configurations, have plenty of flexibility on how you choose to deploy the five available bays. The powerful processor, extremely fast networking, and fast SSD support, make light work of keeping up with heavy workloads and I doubt having a large set of users accessing this drive would pose any issue for it, and while the performance we saw in our own testing is impressive, it’s still barely scratching the surface oh how fast you could push this unit. With support for Windows and Mac users, the QNAP runs the TBS-h574TX runs the ZFS-based QuTS hero operating system, however, if you prefer a more traditional QNAP experience, you can run the QTS operating system too.