Concluding Remarks

This piece originally started out as a small pipeline article. However, digging deeper into the TS-x51 announcement brought to fore interesting information about Silvermont-based platforms in general (and Bay Trail, in particular). In particular, the appearance of Quick Sync as an update to the Bay Trail-D/-M platforms has opened up a a multitude of use-cases. QNAP has grabbed this opportunity to deliver compelling features in the TS-x51 series. Before proceeding further, I wish to comment upon two different aspects.

Value Proposition of the DIY NAS

In the comments section of every 'off-the-shelf' NAS review, we usually see multiple readers indicating how it would be cheaper to build a DIY NAS with a better CPU and/or more number of bays for the same cost. While I would have agreed with them wholeheartedly 2 or 3 years back, the market dynamics have changed quite a bit now, particularly in the consumer / SOHO NAS market. These units are no longer PCs with a Linux distribution, but more of an appliance.

The increase in popularity of mobile devices for both content consumption and creation (capturing photos and videos using a smartphone camera, say) has resulted in a situation where the NAS OS has to be backed up by a complete suite of mobile apps. These apps have to provide a seamless experience while streaming media from the NAS, as well as backing up data, irrespective of the user's location. This also requires operation of a relay server and/or operation of a DDNS service (with appropriate port forwarding). As far as I can see, a one-stop solution to these problems for DIY NAS units is pretty much non-existent. Obviously, these factors are more important in NAS units targeting home consumers and the SOHO market. Even home consumers who are computer-savvy (the typical AnandTech readership) don't want to spend a lot of time building a NAS, configuring it with the appropriate OS, and be on the hook for regular maintenance. In this situation, the value proposition of a DIY NAS for the consumer / SOHO market segment is fading rapidly.

Consumer NAS Market Marches Ahead

In the concluding remarks of the DS214play review, I had praised Synology for being the first NAS vendor to try to bring hardware-accelerated transcoding for media serving into the market. QNAP has taken on the baton now, and brought the more widely tested and supported Quick Sync into the picture. In a similar manner, QNAP deserves praise for being the first to support hosting of virtual machines on the NAS. These types of interesting applications and innovative use-cases are helping the consumer NAS market march ahead.

The QNAP TS-x51 units also sport HDMI ports and XBMC support. In terms of hardware, it is possible to connect either 5- or 8-bay expansion enclosures using one of the USB 3.0 ports. An IR remote is also available as an optional purchase (the TS-x51 units all have an IR sensor for control of media playback). There are a host of other features. Readers interested in getting a more detailed overview are advised to check out the TS-x51 Series Brochure linked on QNAP's website.

I often get asked for NAS recommendations, and irrespective of the use-case, I have always recommended Synology units over the past few years. The reliability and mobile app ecosystem of Synology's DSM has simply remained unparalleled till now. If QNAP manages to deliver on the paper specifications of the TS-x51 (particularly with respect to the video transcoding and virtualization features) and back it up with a good suite of feature-rich mobile apps, Synology might end up with some real competition to worry about in the home consumer / power user / SOHO market.

Virtualization for Home Users
Comments Locked

49 Comments

View All Comments

  • ganeshts - Tuesday, July 1, 2014 - link

    Yes, I have done it and it works.
  • mannyvel - Tuesday, July 1, 2014 - link

    How did your PC reconstruct the RAID? Did you have to match the RAID driver versions on your linux box/pc with your nas?

    Do you have a blog post/etc on your steps/process?
  • ganeshts - Wednesday, July 2, 2014 - link

    Use UFS Explorer. I have a RAID-1 example here:

    http://www.anandtech.com/show/4510/lg-n2a2-nas-rev...

    UFS Explorer will show you the volume as-is and does the heavy lifting of RAID reconstruction. I am not sure what you mean by RAID driver version, as these are all just software RAID, nothing proprietary involved - standard EXT4 file system with mdadm.

    I will try to write a post on RAID-5 rebuild sometime in the near future.
  • mannyvel - Wednesday, July 2, 2014 - link

    Oh, what you're saying is they're using the standard linux LVM-based md-raid, not a hardware raid implementation - which is why UFS Explorer works.
  • GreenThumb - Monday, June 23, 2014 - link

    snakyjake>> 4) Upgradability. I can't afford to keep purchasing a new complete system. And what about new vendor software?

    good point - does QNAP charge for software updates to the same hardware?
  • ganeshts - Monday, June 23, 2014 - link

    Nope.. They haven't charged till now (and none of their competitors in this market segment have that practice, either). Obviously, don't know about the future.
  • bsd228 - Monday, June 23, 2014 - link

    These prosumer NAS units have made tremendous strides in the past 2 years, so I'll agree that for the disinterested, the DIY route makes less and less sense. But for those that care, it's as strong as ever. Haswell brought us 10W processors that can do everything Atom could, but 10x faster. For virtualization wishes, or background conversions of dvds/blurays to more highly compressed mp4s, this is essential, but with it sitting idle most of the time, 80W units were wasteful, hot, noisy.

    The key failing still present in this QNAP series is the lack of ECC memory. My HP Microservers have that that for 4 generations, as well as the ability to run numerous VMs (OS dependent - I use solaris). It was until the Gen8s stuck with a poor AMD processor and still isn't where I'd like it to be. So my next one will be truly DIY, not a nearly turnkey microserver.
  • Shadowmaster625 - Thursday, June 26, 2014 - link

    Single pass transcoding is a joke. You're talking 3 times the file size for the same quality vs a properly configured two pass encoding. What is the point of doing that? The file is still going to end up being way to big.

Log in

Don't have an account? Sign up now