Review on QNAP TS 673A 8G High Performance 2 5GbE Ports by Christopher Ruth

I have a QNAP TS-453 Pro 4-bay NAS and I was constantly running out of space. I originally had four 2TB drives configured in RAID 5, giving me 5.4TB of net storage space. That went wrong quickly. I replaced the drives with four 4TB drives, giving me 10.5TB of storage. A year later I replaced them with four 6TB, giving me 16TB of storage. Buying four new drives at once is bloody expensive (in a RAID array all drives must be the same capacity as RAID shrinks itself to one small drive (if you have one 2TB drive and three 4TB drives , RAID sees all the drives ) as 2TB). So I decided to go with the new six-bay QNAP TS-673A drive. The problem is that a 4-bay NAS erases 25% of the 6 backup bays, you actually have 5 storage drives using only 17% for CRC backup. With the same 6TB drives I can go from 16TB to 27 TB of pure storage go adding two more drives. Thus, a NAS with six bays is much more economical. Of course, you can opt for an 8-bay NAS, but then you will experience more noise and vibration, as well as higher temperatures. Add that 8-bay NAS is recommended for RAID 6 configuration, CRC protection requires two drives. According to QNAP, you can simply take the drives out of the old NAS and plug them into the new NAS (in the right order). You don't have to backup everything, set up a new NAS and restore data. It works, but there are some limitations. First of all, the firmware on the old NAS must be up to date, otherwise problems will arise. Also, some licenses (e.g. Twonky) will NOT transfer to the new NAS. Now to the NAS itself. The TS-673A is powered by the new AMD Ryzen V1500B quad-core processor with eight threads and a clock speed of 2.2 GHz. This processor should be 300% faster than the Intel Celeron J1900 and slightly faster than the 2.13.4 GHz AMD RX-421ND quad-core quad-thread processor. One of the notable benefits of the new processor is that it consumes 50% less power when idle. My old TS-453 Pro would occasionally, but rarely, freeze a bit when running multiple streams or streaming video at a high bitrate. I have yet to see if a faster processor will help with that. QNAP seems to become more fragile every time a new generation comes out, and this is no exception. Drive bays require no tools, you don't need screws to hold hard drives in place. But the tray-lock mechanism and front cover feel awfully cheap. Fortunately, you don't need to swap drives that often. I miss the LED display that the old QNAPs had, you always see the current status. The currently used LEDs are not that useful. You now get two 2.5GbE ports instead of the usual four 1Gb ports. The big question is how many consumer routers support this. Adding an additional hard drive to an array seems much more clumsy than before. The biggest downside of the new TS-673A is the price. $900 is too much for a 6-bay NAS, admittedly a comparable Synology DS1621+ is only $100 cheaper. The purchase is made and I spent several hours transferring everything. Let's see if it was worth it. Update: Booting a NAS with five 6TB drives takes a long time to initialize. The NAS took about 36 hours before completing the task. While you can add data to the NAS during initialization, the response time is extremely painful as it takes time for the NAS to respond. Once the initialization is complete, the NAS will really pick up speed. It's a bit faster than my TS-453 Pro, the video streaming is much smoother. So far I haven't experienced any hesitation when fast forwarding or skipping chapters like my old NAS did. While this didn't happen that often on my old NAS (I had no problems 99.9% of the time), the files (these were high transfer rate files and quite large) that I had problems with are no longer delivered. . Remember that you must first set the date/time on the NAS before doing anything else. My new Twonky license was deactivated when I later corrected the system time. I need to contact QNAP to fix this issue. Note that you need to buy a Twonky license from QNAP, if you buy a license directly from Twonky, the add-on will not be activated at all. Update 2: QNAP fixed my DLNA problem. It was a configuration problem on the NAS. Twonky not working is a bug in the firmware that should be fixed in the next version. Update 3: QNAP was able to solve all my problems with the latest firmware update. Twonky is working now, the NAS reported different MAC addresses causing the problem.