Hands on: QNAP TS-264 review | Global News Avenue

Q NAP brings so much NAS case, it’s difficult to place a specific model within that range. The TS-264 falls into the “midrange top pick” category, which is QNAP’s way of saying it, and is suitable for small offices, homes, and microenterprise. The “2” tells you this is a dual-bay device that can hold up to two 3.5-inch or 2.5-inch drives.

There are NVMe slots inside, which can accommodate up to two 2TB solid state drive, It can be used as storage for a hard drive or as a cache for an SSD. QNAP pairing Intel Onboard 8MB Celeron N5095 processor Memory, No further upgrades are possible. On the back, you’ll find an HDMI socket, two 2.5GbE connectors, two USB-A 2 ports, and a USB-A 3.2 Gen 2 port, with another Gen 2 socket on the front panel.

That’s not bad for the price, but you can upgrade with a dual-port PCI-E 10GbE network card if needed. It also supports a variety of tower and rack storage expansion units, some of which require mini-SAS connector cards that occupy PCI-E slots.

In theory, you can set up this NAS completely tool-free, but you’ll have a hard time getting used to it NVMe drives There is no need to remove the side panels, this requires a screwdriver. Even with it removed, both slots are still partially obscured by the hard drive cage, making it difficult to insert an SSD. Putting it all back together, you can run Qfinder Pro to locate the NAS on your network, connect to its web management interface and start configuring QNAP’s QTS operating system.

While QTS is generally excellent, it feels more technical and less slick than some of its competitors, particularly Synology’s DSM software. Being able to choose between thick and thin provisioning, or using more traditional static disk volumes is great, but it does complicate things compared to its more powerful competitors. If using NVMe drives, you’ll need to provide their physical security ID (PSID) numbers so they can be securely erased during setup, so it’s a good idea to photograph them in place before putting them back into the case.

We loaded the TS-264 with 14TB and 12TB NAS disks and two 1TB NVMe SSDs from WD, initially configuring them as two independent RAID1 volumes formatted with Btrfs (or EXT4 if you prefer). Over a single 2.5GbE connection, it scored 487 points for disk performance and 482 points for the SSD in PCMark 10 data drives. In the ATTO disk benchmark, the TS-264 was on par with competing two-bay chassis for 4KB and 16KB file operations, but was ahead for 2MB files due to its faster network connection.