QNAP TS-464-8G review

The TS-464-8G is a four-bay tower NAS from QNAP. It takes four 3.5-inch SATA 6Gb/s drives, and QNAP lists support for HDD and SSD types in 2.5-inch, 3.5-inch and M.2 sizes. It ships with no drives installed, so you supply the storage. QNAP says the unit supports up to 72 TB and 4 TB of M.2 SSD caching.

The bay count and the two M.2 2280 slots give this model a flexible storage layout. The M.2 slots run at PCIe Gen 3 x1 and are not hot-swappable. That limits them to a modest link each, which suits caching better than a fast primary pool.

RAID support covers levels 0, 1, 5, 6 and 10, plus JBOD. QNAP also lists online RAID migration, online RAID expansion and RAID rebuild. Bad block scan and disk roaming are on the spec list too. Listed file systems are FAT32, HFS+, NTFS, ext3 and ext4.

The processor is an Intel Celeron N5095 with four cores and four threads, boosting up to 2.9 GHz. QNAP lists Intel UHD Graphics with hardware-accelerated transcoding, and AES-NI is supported. One Slickdeals owner prefers this QNAP over a Synology model for hardware transcoding with Plex. With four threads and hardware transcoding, it is a sensible match for a media server alongside file storage. Heavier mixed workloads will share those four cores.

The unit comes with 8 GB of DDR4 in SO-DIMM form. It has two slots and a stated maximum of 16 GB. That is enough headroom for a set of containers or a light virtual machine. The 16 GB ceiling is the limit if you plan to run several VMs at once. It also carries 4000 MB of flash memory.

Two 2.5GbE ports are built in. QNAP lists data rates of 10, 100, 1000 and 2500 Mbit/s. The unit has one PCIe Gen 3 x2 slot, and QNAP says 5GbE and 10GbE are available as options through an expansion card. Reviewers praise the dual 2.5GbE LAN, the two M.2 slots and the PCIe expansion. That option means the network speed is not fixed at purchase.

Other network features include iSCSI support, a DHCP server, Wake-on-LAN and Dynamic DNS. For connections, there are two USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A ports and two USB 2.0 ports.

QNAP ships the unit with QTS and offers QuTS hero as an option. That gives you a choice of two QNAP operating systems. The spec sheets list the RAID, iSCSI and network service features above. They do not set out an app catalogue or update history, so judge the software on those features rather than on ecosystem claims.

The main owner complaint concerns power. A QNAP forum user and a NASCompares commenter both consider the draw high for a four-bay unit. If the NAS will run around the clock, that is worth weighing against the hardware on offer. NASCompares also published a dedicated power consumption test of this model, if you want to see the figures.

QNAP lists a standard warranty of 3 years. Taken together, the four bays, two M.2 slots, dual 2.5GbE and PCIe expansion slot suit a home or small-office user who wants room to grow. The 16 GB memory ceiling and the reported power draw are the two points to check against your plans.