QNAP TS-433-4G-US 4 Bay NAS with Quad-core Processor, 4 GB DDR4 RAM and 2.5GbE Network (Diskless)

I am giving the NAS five stars for quality and ease of use once it is setup. It receives four stars for difficulty of setup. The manual tells you how to install the hard drive and download the app, any of assistance is not covered. I had to search You Tube for a tutorial video by an independent publisher.Once setup it is smooth sailing from there. This NAS runs $30-40.00 cheaper than all the others here on Amazon or anywhere else. It s a high quality product with a solid build. I set this up on a Mac and it was discovered right away without a problem. I highly recommend that you checkut before shelling out more money for something that does the same thing.

I purchased the QNAP TS-133-14WD-US 1-Bay Home NAS with 4TB Storage to replace my old Seagate Personal Cloud Home Media Storage Device (4TB) from 2017. The QNAP NAS offers significantly more power and many modern features, including a built-in web server with support for PHP and MySQL. Overall, I'm very happy with this upgrade!

I use it to stream videos to Roku and as a central file location for multiple clients. I can save files to it with my PC and then access them using my Phone (Android). For sensitive documents this seems much safer than using "the cloud". I can hear it when I'm in the room where it sits (I have old fashioned spinning platters) but it is not objectionably loud or distracting. I found all the various software modules to be very confusing.

I bought this system because I wanted RAID redundancy and my Dad and I both bought the same systems intending to backup also save our backups to each other's NASs remotely. QNAP says this a a core feature and has software to do it. Every step of the step of for this product has been incredibly difficult. My dad is an electrical engineer who designed tech systems at a university and I am a fairly tech savvy analyst who is used to troubleshooting problems and this set up has driven us crazy. We follow what seems to be simple, clear, if sparse, directions on QNAP's website and run in to problem after problem. Some we have solved with a few hours of trouble shooting. Backing up to each other we still have not been able to solve after days of trouble shooting and messaging back and forth with QNAP support, with so far mediocre assistance from QNAP. While I can get basic connectivity from the drive and have the RAID redundancy for my backup, this has so far turned out to be a really expensive and time-wasting external drive. Do yourself a favor and just by a couple of plug-and-play external drives for your home backup needs if not an IT professional.

Sunday, June 26, 2022I've previously owned two Western Digital MyCloud NAS storage devices. Their hours-and-hours, and even days-and-days of HDD clicking activity annoyed me because, in my opinion, they were wasting energy due to bad software or hardware engineering choices. In comparison, my new QNAP TS-233, which is also a RAID device like the MyClouds, spins down after a period of no user-activity--I can hear its hard drive spin up and take a few seconds for the Qnap to come back online at my PC.This "spin down" means that you don't have to install the much-more-expensive specially made NAS hard drives that are designed to be spinning 24/7. I've experimentally installed three different hard drives in my Qnap. The first was the expensive Western Digital 2-Terrabyte NAS hard drive that came with my second Western Digital MyCloud--my first My Cloud only lasted about a year and a half so I threw the whole thing away. The second drive I installed was a less-expensive Western Digital Blue drive as the 2nd drive in my Qnap 2-drive RAID configuration. It's installation after the first drive was online for several months, was a snap! It was easy to install and configure using the Qnap user web page.When I became convinced that my QNAP TS-233 would be my way to go for serious network storage, I bought and installed a Seagate 8-Terrabyte Barracuda drive, and it is working just fine. My 2-Terrabyte drive is sitting along side, and I can switch them out, anytime I like, just like that!So to sum up, in my opinion, the "spin down" of my Qnap hard drive after a short period of user inactivity saves energy and prolongs the hard drive's usable life, making the purchase of the more-expensive specially made NAS drives unnecessary. The "spin down" also lets me know that my network storage RAID device is not needlessly wasting energy--that it was designed, built, and programmed better than my Western Digital MyClouds.By the way, after gutting my second MyCLoud of its hard drive, I threw the rest away. It was always warm to the touch, because it was always wasting energy, so it had to go, for the last time! And that’s too bad because I’ve always held a high regard for the Western Digital brand. So let me say that they just “blew it” in terms of the MyClouds.To be fair, let me add that my network storage device is for my home use. If I had needed a 24/7 network storage device, such as for serving an online business of some kind, or for something like that, then I cannot say how my Qnap would compare to a Western Digital MyCLoud in terms of 24/7 reliability. Only my comments about "energy saving" and "temperature" would fairly apply--higher temperatures should translate to lower usable lives, both for the hard drives and for the CPU and motherboards. But, again, those are my opinions.I hope that my review will add to your knowledge in order to help you make the right buying decision for your network storage needs.