Review on 💪 High-Performance QNAP 4-Bay NAS/iSCSI IP-SAN | AMD R Quad-core, 10G-ready (TVS-473e-4G-US) by Don Acevedo

I rarely buy anything and it far exceeds my expectations, but I have to say, that this product has met expectations. I was a bit reluctant to buy as I didn't really want to spend that much on a media server to run Plex and a file server with RAID, but after reading about it I decided to give it a try. I'm fairly technical (this setup replaces a standalone Plex server running Linux from the command line and the old ReadyNas NV+ which is pretty finicky these days) and expect to have to do a lot of command line functions to access some of the more advanced access features (spoilers, I never needed it). This thing is very easy to set up and manage; much easier than I expected. Enabling and disabling features from the web portal interface is very easy, and Qnap is more than powerful enough to run Plex server transcoding on the Apple TV in the living room while simultaneously playing media on my office computer and acting on a file server. simultaneously; my typical use case. I suspect that I can easily transcode to a second device, among other features, but I haven't tried it. Also, via a single gigabit port it's very responsive when copying and backing up large media files back and forth, so I didn't think I'd hook up additional ports (it obviously supports up to 4 gigabit ports if you have a dedicated switch) which I will not receive). Playback is smooth and chapter skipping is relatively quick, but not as fast as chapter skipping on a BluRay disc from my Blu-Ray player. In addition, it is very quiet in normal operation. I have it in my basement, but I could add it to the media center in my apartment building and play media directly from there without worrying about annoying fan noise. Note that you will need to buy your own drives, so keep that in mind as an additional cost. In addition to the cost of this server, consider 8 hard drives. Finally, Qnap uses less than a quarter the power of my previous standalone Plex server and my old ReadyNAS file server, and is much faster. A very nicely made car.