Qnap TS-453mini

[HEXUS]

A smaller, stylish alternative to the award-winning TS-453 Pro.

Read more.

[cjs150]

Very nice. I own a much older QNAP 4 bay NAS and it is rock solid - maybe no longer the fastest but for what I use it for, good enough. With the demise of Windows Media Centre, the inclusion of Kodi server as an alternative to Plex is interesting.

Being paranoid about HDD failure, I consider 4 bay NAS to be the minimum for safety, but as disk capacities get ever bigger the question must be is that really necessary? Would a simple 2 Bay NAS in Raid 1 be enough for most people? In my current NAS I use about 4TB, mostly Blu-ray movies, largely uncompressed (well if you have the space why compress and lose quality), that is roughly 150 movies and a load of TV series. It will be years before 4K movies are the norm and even then I probably would not upgrade my collection. My use is, I hope, probably fairly typically - 2x 10TB HDD in Raid 1 would be a jump in capacity.

What do others think - what home use requires a 4 bay NAS these days

[crossy]

What do others think - what home use requires a 4 bay NAS these days

Excluding the mid-range Hexus dweller (the high-end folks won't bother with a pre-build NAS, they'll roll their own...) the only justification for a 4-bay NAS I can think of is if you need more capacity than is available on a single drive. Totally agree that a multibay home NAS should always be configured as at least RAID1. Mid-range Hexus folks might need the performance etc of RAID0+1, RAID5+ so for them a 4-bay is the minimum acceptable leve I'm guessingl.

Getting back to the article - interesting set of numbers. I'm also struck that the WD kit comes out as "middling" in everything. So not the best at anything, nor the worst neither - presumably making it a good "safe" (but unexciting) choice. Good news for me since I've got two WD single-bay units at the moment. Really would like to be able to consolidate to a single 2-bay (mirrored) unit, but funds don't permit at the moment.

[ayamy]

I'm really interested in this NAS.... I'm choosing beetween the Pro and the Mini one. My concern is about the noise. The mini is sposored by

Qnap as a sleak model with "a quiet exhaust for heat dissipation" .. so I would to know how much silent is the 453 mini than the 453 pro ?