Brimming with VM goodness: Qnap TS-453mini 4-bay NAS

Diminutive do-it-all Celeron storehouse

Nifty NAS

These days no decent NAS worth its salt doesn’t have a suite of mobile apps and the TS-453mini is no exception; Qfile lets you browse and manage files stored on your Android, iOS or Windows Phone device. It can manage multiple NAS units and includes auto-uploading of any new photos.

Qmanager does what it says on the tin, allowing the control and monitoring of the NAS. Qmusic, Qphoto and Qvideo allow for multimedia sharing on a mobile device.

CrystalDiskMark results: RAID 0 (left) and RAID 1 (right)

CrystalDiskMark results: RAID 5 (left) and RAID 10 (right)

To test the TS-453mini I loaded it up with 4 4TB WD Red Pro drives and built it into RAID 0, 1, 5 and 10 arrays benchmarking each with ATTO, CrystalDiskMark and Intel’s NAS Performance Toolkit. With a pretty powerful processor and stacks of RAM, the TS-453mini shows a consistent level of high performance between all the arrays in both Sequential and 4K benchmarks.

Celeron powered, Qnap's TS-453mini isn't the cheapest 4-bay NAS but it's certainly comprehensive

Running Intel NAS Performance Toolkit produced impressive results compared to the NAS boxes tested in our recent four-bay round-up, although these were a good deal cheaper. There wasn’t a massive amount of variation between RAID modes with the best results being HD Video Playback 109.4 MB/s (RAID 1), with RAID 0 scoring marginally higher for Content Creation 14.7MB/s, Office Productivity 63.8MB/s and Photo Album 16.1MB/s.

The Reg Verdict

The Qnap TS-453mini is a superb 4-bay well equipped NAS, albeit a pretty expensive one; especially the 8GB RAM version. Indeed, you have to wonder how 8GB of DDR3 memory could ever cost over a hundred quid – the difference between the two versions, for both office and home use. Qnap’s QTS 4.1 is one of the best UIs around which despite being feature rich is not cluttered and remains easy to navigate around. ®

Thanks to TRENDnet UK for the loan of the TV-IP310P IP camera.