It was delivered just in time and in perfect condition. Read more

This NAS is equipped with a powerful Intel i7 gen 12 CPU and 32GB DDR4 RAM, which should be enough for majority of SMBs' needs (except those doing video editing or heavy VMing). Read more

TLDR: In summary, in each of the 3x TVS-h874 new NAS units I have purchased, drive bay 2 has had issues in relation to I/O. This has remained consistent, regardless of changing SATA SSDs brand and model, and between different SSD drives of the same model that are reported compatible. There's a lot to like about the tech specs of the QNAP TVS-hx74 series of turnkey NAS systems. I had gone this route over Synology due to Synology’s shift to only providing tech support if you use their HDDs. I haven't looked into the exact details of what that means, but it's all over their site's unit compatibility page when you look up what drives are supported by which unit. Their newest units have shifted to only listing Synology branded drives. QNAP units though work with a variety of 3rd party manufacturers. The price difference between these 3rd party drives "NAS" drives (such as Seagate, Samsung, and Western Digital) are significantly cheaper than the Synology. Quick drive pricing comparison w/ similar performance and durability at time of writing: 3.5" SATA HDD - 8 TB: Toshiba N300: $170 vs Synology Plus: $210 (+23.5%) @ 12TB: Toshiba N300: $230 vs Synology Plus: $280 (+21.7%) 2.5" SATA SSD - 1.92 TB: Kingston DC600M: $225 vs Synology Enterprise: $500 (+122.2%) M.2 NVMe (sized for cache use) - WD Red SN700 500GB: $75 vs Synology $150 (+200%) M.2 NVMe (sized for storage) - the largest Synology NVME is only 800GB and it's $300. Of similar size at 1TB, the WD Red SN700 is $110 (2TB $190, 4TB $365) Other plusses this unit line has are PCIe 4.0 expansion slots (though their only listed compatible GPUs are GTX 1650 and older which can be difficult to find, particularly new). This though also includes the m.2 drive locations (many other units out there are PCIe 3.0). These seem to have a larger variety of uses, such as higher speed NICs or Thunderbolt 3 (4 will likely be released at some point because the only difference between the x74T and non-T units is that Thunderbolt card according to QNAP sales support). This all pointed me towards picking one up, and I was excited. For the original unit I purchased, I picked up some Samsung NVME and 2.5" SATA SSDs, along with some WD 14TB 3.5" HDD's. I used their SSD profiling tool to help determine the over-provisioning amounts for the SSDs to improve their performance and potentially extend their useful life. Note this does take a long time whenever SATA based drives are tested (talking days depending on selections) and even with NVMe will likely take at least a day (if using them with larger drives for storage). Then building the raid array (I went with QTS over QuTS for their Qtier and larger number of included camera licenses for the potential future) and again this takes a lot of time. Going the QuTS OS route is reportedly faster in this regard due to ZFS and how that works, but by how much I don't know. Next during the transfer of approximately 3TB of data from an old NAS with failing drives to the QNAP h874, its initial estimated completion was 3 days, but this kept getting later and later each time I checked. I had thought this was caused by the old NAS’s drive and I'd just let it go and it would finish whenever it could. Upon final completion, I looked at the drive info on the QNAP and found that two of SATA SSDs read write speeds were significantly lower in drive bay's 1 & 2, showing NCQ off. Checking the QNAP site about the issue it said to create a ticket, which I did. After working with them for about 2 weeks I was nearing the end of my 30 days to return the unit and they said that the unit was likely DoA. So, to have time to test the replacement and have a return window in case things didn't work out, I returned this unit and the Samsung drives as they were newer than the ones listed on the QNAP compatibility chart just in case. QNAP support said they'd look for the unit to be returned so they can check things further. I ordered the 2nd unit along with some Western digital NVMe and SATA SSDs that were specifically listed as well, though sadly the SATA ones were a much lower capacity which changed my storage/raid plans some, going from all storage to 2 in storage in Qtier and 2 for read/write caching... I didn't get that far. Instead of placing the SSDs in bays 1-4 and HDDs in 5-8, I chose to alternate them to allow more airflow around each of the HDDs, now going HDD, SSD, HDD, and so on (SSDs now in 2,4,6,8). I went through and ran their SSD profiling again, but this time on just 2 + 4 in raid 1. Again, NCQ became disable on drives 2 & 4. Created a new ticket with QNAP and while waiting for their reply, ran the test on 6 +8 in Raid 1, but with a 25% total capacity write amount instead of 50%. This one completed without issue, so I turned NCQ back on for 2 & 4 and reran the test using the lower 25% write amount. This time drive bay 2 had some unreported errors (not visible in logs I have access to) and no longer registered as being installed in the unit. Still waiting for QNAP support's reply, reset the entire device back to defaults (only way I can find anywhere to remove a raid array through the QTS web interface) but swapped the 2 pairs of SSDs so the drives that were in 6 & 8 were now in drive bays 2 & 4 and vice versa. The system found all drives so I again performed the profiling test on drive 6 & 8 (no issues before) in bays 2 & 4 with the 25% write amount (which has the side benefit of decreasing the overall test time). This completed and didn't throw any errors but I noticed that their read write speeds had taken a nose dive and were similar to the results from the first unit. By this time QNAP support had used the remote connection I created with the ticket and found that there was an issue that they could see with drive bay 2 and that regrettably I had just received 2 DoA units in a row. Now given it's beyond my 30-day window for the 4x 14tb WD Red Pro drives that I had purchased during a sale at WD's site during the original round of parts purchasing, I couldn't return them and using them in a Synology would end with me having no technical support, I went with returning the 2nd DoA unit and purchasing a now 3rd tvs-h874. While waiting for that to arrive, I sent in a question to the nice folks at NAScompares about what they would suggest as a drive configuration using the 2x 2tb NVMe, 4x 2tb SATA SSDs, and 4x 14tb HDDs. This took a bit as well as it is asking someone for free advice and they even state that the reply might take 7 days. I had time to kill waiting for the 3rd unit, so it wasn't a huge deal. They replied with something akin to what I was already planning, with the difference being having the 2 NVMe and 2 SATA SSDs in the same tier within Qtier (it has three; kind of like fast, medium, and slow and moves the less frequently accessed items, etc. to slower tiers as determined by whatever decision tree they have set up) with the 4 HDDs and the remaining 2 SSDs as caching. My original thought was using the NVMe in the fast, 2 SATA SSDs in medium, and the HDDs in slow; slightly different, but like better. This is because there is no current way within Qtier to remove all of the tiering, only removing the fastest tier. By putting the NVMe and SATA SSDs in the same tier, this allows you o have the option to remove them in the future and reconfigure Qtier's setup at a later date while saving all the data in what was the slowest tier (which is where the large capacity HDDs end up). Rebuilding would then move the items that benefit from SSD speeds back out to that tier when it was reconfigured. Sadly, I didn't get that far. In this 3rd unit, again the SATA SSDs were in alternating bays (2, 4, 6, & 8) and as I've specifically asked QNAP support about and specifically mentioned what bays had the issues, etc. and received no commentary as to avoid doing so. Again, this was in the hope that this would allow more airflow near the HDDs due to the SSD bays having most of their tray space being empty. I set up the profiling test to run on the NVMe + SATA SSD combination and the moment it began the write portion, the NAS beeped an error, the indicator for bay 2 went red and checking it in the web portal, I found that it was now reporting a non-SMART error for that drive for Disk Access History (I/O) and that I should replace the drive. The SSD's SMART checks contained on the drive itself were all OK and without any errors or warnings. Now I'm in the process of returning the 3rd NAS unit and the more recently purchased SATA SSD's to Amazon and I'm seeing specific warnings about having my return amount decreased, etc. for the various reasons they list, adding more worry to the headache of wondering what to do with $1k worth of HDD that I can't return due to time passed. Other turn-key NAS providers platforms tend to have more issues and less applications than QNAP and Synology, and the various NAS os's (trueNAS, openmediavault, etc.) are much more involved in setup, management, etc. and not really turn-key. If I go the Synology route, to have tech support, I need to buy new storage drives at higher prices (particularly if I involve SSDs). If I go NAS OS route, I need to figure out all the hardware to be involved from case to power supply and if its compatible. If I go with a smaller brand turnkey, I still need to check compatibility, and likely lose out on hardware features and software features/apps. Read more

Got this to replace and older QNAP, was easy to migrate the data (just took a long time to transfer 15TB). Really like the high CPU and memory as well as the 2.5Gb network ports, drastically reduce file transfer speeds from laptop and desktops Read more