QNAP TS-230 2-Bay Home NAS Realtek RTD1296 ARM Cortex-A53 Quad-core 1.4 GHz Processor, 2GB DDR4 RAM

Great NAS for cheap cost! I was in between this and another one and this had mixed reviews. I purchased this and a 4 TB NAS HD for under $300 and this has the highest DDR4 ram for under $300. If you're on the fence do it. This thing is NOT slow like other reviews say. It works great, it can function as an SMTP server, web server, FTP server, it has a TON of applications that can easily be installed. It is very fast and easy to install the HD and to set it up was painless. I have it hard wired to my router and the transfer speeds are great. I now have all my data on (1) SSD on my alienware PC, which is backed up to a normal internal 1 TB HD, and then backed up to my NAS. Since I have multiple backups I have cancelled my Google drive to not have to pay for it. It works great.

TS-230 is a great budget solution because RTS1296 CPU with 2GB RAM is shown in Synology DS218, which costs 71$ more. It looks great with light blue (Hatsune Miku) colored state-of-art design and icon-shaped LEDs. (Other NASes have rectangular LEDs with icons printed.) The trays can hold the hard drives tightly by screws and snap-guides.It works great for backup and media sharing (as a network drive) for PCs. Hybrid Backup Sync and Qsync Central are well-made software that always work flawlessly. It showed no significant lag even when I played a video while 3 backups running. I think that it is a good-fit for home use. USB copy button is also very useful.However, multimedia apps are not satisfactory. Plex media server works with 1080p videos in limited file formats, but you will not need it if you have a decent PC with Potplayer. Ai based QuMagie is little more than a joke because it doesn't understand one person cannot be shown twice in a single photo. It was really annoying when I put my son's class graduation photo. It asked me endlessly if each random kid is my son.In addition, the enclosure is not noise-proof. It echoes the hard drive noise.

If you expect to plug it in and have a drive, like a USB stick, update your expectations. That is good and bad. This is a very good device, quiet, reliable, and apparently secure. It even makes two physical drives look like 1 big one. Getting it set up took some doing. The instructions were good and on-line help good, it just took a lot more than I expected.If you need a kid to show you how to use the remote, don't buy this unless you have a techie nearby. If you need a good NAS for the money and can deal with some techie set-up, this is a really good choice.

Great first NAS for anyone looking to start with. I only use it for photo backups since my wife and I run our own photography business. Setting up the drives in RAID 1 took awhile but from what I've seen, thats standard. Once the drives were set up and privileges set, everything became drag and drop. Its handy to be able to view photos from my phone and back up mobile photos also. Overall, the 450 or so I spent (iron wolf 4TB drives plus this) was well worth it. It totally beats having multiple portable drives laying all over with what ever photos on them that 2-3 years from now you'll forget and have to search each one again.Also, didn't use their tech support so I rated it a 3/5.

I purchased this to replace an old DLink 123 Nas. I was just looking for a simple SMB server with raid 1. BUT WOW the features are impressive, 3 USB ports for external storage, snapshots, web servers, and on and on this is a complete server! I'm really impressed and setup was easy. I will be buying another for the office, great product would recommend.

I bought this because QNAP is the only company to offer a low-end NAS that advertises USB-host connectivity, so it can be used like a direct-attached storage device.However, in practice I couldn't get this to work.Overall, because this is so low-powered, the interface was laggy. It wasn't a good experience for me. I returned it and bought the Synology DS220j thinking that would be a better experience. While the UI was excellent, the performance of the DS220j is also just too slow to be valuable. For example, when doing a USB Copy from internal to external, the copy speed was far below the transfer rates I'd expect.I finally settled on the Asustor AS4002T which supports 10gbe, a feature none of the others do. Asustor's UI is better than QNAP and comparable to Synology. It was a little more money, but I'm very happy with it in terms of performance. Maybe I can save some new NAS buyers some heart and head-ache and recommend the AS4002T or if you want a little more expandability the AS4004T. (With this NAS and a $30 2.5Gbe usb network adapter, you can saturate the bandwidth of a conventional hard drive when doing transfers over the network, which I think is just great. At 2.5Gbe, I'm getting ~70-80 metabytes per second. On the QNAP I was limited to about 10.)