QNAP TVS-h874-i5-32G-US 8 Bay High-Speed Desktop NAS with M.2 PCIe Slots, 12th Gen Intel Core CPU, up to 64GB DDR4 RAM, 2.5 GbE Networking and PCIe Gen 4 expandability (Diskless)

I was a Synology NAS user for the last 15 years and was looking to upgrade my 15 year old 12 bay Synology NAS.I love the powerful Synology OS and how reliable it is, unfortunately my 15 year old NAS cannot receive any new updates and is restricted to max 6tb hard drives. The processor of my Synology NAS was also under, but it was more than enough to handle NAS tasks.I was looking at the higher up models of Synology for more powerful processors for hardware encoding and running VMs. To my disappointment, those models only support Synology labeled hard drives which are 3 times more expensive while being slower.So, I looked at QNAP, even though there was some bad press about hacking and ransomware attacks on their NASes. These concerns very quickly dispelled after I started using theses NASes.The TVS-h874X comes with an i9 Intel processor and 64GB ram. It also has 2 * 10G Ethernet included, with the latest USB A and C ports. There’s also an available PCIe gen 4 slot for either adding a powerful graphics card or expansion card. This is incredibly powerful capabilities for a NAS.I have added a 16 bay expansion to this NAS by buying a QNAP expansion bay directly from QNAP. I populated the 8 bays on my NAs as well as 12 * 3.5” bays on the expansion with Seagate exos 20tb hard drives. I also added 4*2tb 2.5” SSDs on the enclosure, giving an incredibly powerful and vast storage.The TVS-h874X also has 2*M.2 NVMe slots, which I populated with 2*2tb M.2 NVMe drives. I set this up as raid1 and used it to install the QuTS hero operating system for maximum speed.The QuTS hero operating system supports the robust self correcting ZFS file system, making it an incredibly powerful and reliable NAS. QNAP also lets you access my NAS anywhere in the world without opening my home network via ddns. This is really secure and makes it incredibly useful.I also have subscribed to their “myQNAP cloud” to store some of the NAS files of site with the QNAP hybrid backup.For security it has two factor authentication, built in firewall, antivirus apps etc. All of these are pretty powerful and similar to the firewall on Pfsense. I can restrict by domain. Countries etc. Great. I feel that my QNAP NASes have Pfsense level security which is very secure.It helps to be pretty experienced with Pfsense, but their instructions and videos on YouTube make it easy for everyone to use.They also have container station and a VM station for virtual machines. The i9 Intel cpu can easily handle this.This is far beyond what I was hoping for in Synology. I am now a QNAP convert. I bought 2 of these usines for replication and data spill over.Highly recommended! I am a convert.

This product is awesome. Easy to set up and use with many applications included.

I have a Asustor Lockerstore 4 NAS that works pretty well as a Plex server, up to 4 simultaneously streams. I put four 6 TB drives in it thinking I will have enough storage space. Four years later, I buy the core i5 Qnap and put 8 12 TB drives in it. I've run 16 4K streams simultaneously and didn't use more than 10% CPU. Built in graphics processor, this thing is a beast. A upgraded the memory to 64 gig and run my Plex using two 4th gen 1tb m.2 drives. Having 64 TB of storage I think I won't have to worry about running out of storage any time soon. The ZFS file system is second to none. Goofing around and seeing just how awesome it is, I pulled two drives out, running raid 6, and continue to copy data from my Asustor over. Waited 45 minutes and then put the two drives back in. I had 12 TB of data to copy over and the ZFS raid rebuilt itself within 2 hours while still writing the data coming over the 2.5 gig network. If it was btrfs, it would have been a day or longer to rebuild. I don't have many people accessing my NAS at the same time, mostly it sits idle. I have 4 windows machines that back up to it as well as 3 Linux boxes. With ZFS deduplication, all the windows operating systems files aren't taking up a lot of space, only what is different. The snapshot settings are totally awesome, can restore a deleted file in seconds. Even an entire movie directory can be restored in a few minutes. I ran 16 simultaneously streams of the largest 4K Jelly fish files and the NAS didn't break a sweat. And that's just the core i5. I can't imagine how bad ass the core i9 would be.If you want a killer Plex Media Server, you can't beat this machine... Well, yeah, the core i9 is the pinnacle... You get what I'm saying.ZFS is the best file system going. Don't need to worry about bit rot. I set all my folders with deduplication and compression. ZFS handles everything automatically.