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expiredvns1 posted Dec 13, 2022 05:43 AM
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expiredvns1 posted Dec 13, 2022 05:43 AM

QNAP TS-653D-4G 6-Bay NAS Enclosure

+ Free Shipping

$520

$649

19% off
B&H Photo Video
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Deal Details
B&H Photo Video has QNAP TS-653D-4G-US 6-Bay NAS Enclosure on sale for $559 > now $519.99. Shipping is free.

Thanks to Community Member vns1 for finding this deal.

Key Features:
  • Intel Celeron J4125 quad-core 2.0 GHz processor (burst up to 2.7 GHz)
  • Intel HD Graphics 600
  • 4GB SO-DIMM DDR4 (Max 8GB)
  • 6 x 3.5-inch drive bays (Diskless)
  • 2 x 2.5GbE ports
  • 1 x PCIe Gen 2 slot
  • 3 x USB 2.0 ports
  • 2 x USB 3.2 Gen 1 ports
  • 1 x HDMI output

Editor's Notes

Written by Corwin | Staff
  • About this deal:
    • This is priced $90 lower (13.8% savings) than the $649 list price.
    • Refer to the forum thread for additional details and discussion.
  • About this product:
    • This has a 4.5 out of 5 star overall rating on Amazon based on over 840 reviews.
  • About this store:
  • No Longer Available:
    • Amazon has QNAP TS-653D-4G 6-Bay NAS Enclosure on sale for $559. Shipping is free.

Original Post

Written by vns1
Product Info
Community Notes
About the Poster
Deal Details
Product Info
Community Notes
About the Poster
B&H Photo Video has QNAP TS-653D-4G-US 6-Bay NAS Enclosure on sale for $559 > now $519.99. Shipping is free.

Thanks to Community Member vns1 for finding this deal.

Key Features:
  • Intel Celeron J4125 quad-core 2.0 GHz processor (burst up to 2.7 GHz)
  • Intel HD Graphics 600
  • 4GB SO-DIMM DDR4 (Max 8GB)
  • 6 x 3.5-inch drive bays (Diskless)
  • 2 x 2.5GbE ports
  • 1 x PCIe Gen 2 slot
  • 3 x USB 2.0 ports
  • 2 x USB 3.2 Gen 1 ports
  • 1 x HDMI output

Editor's Notes

Written by Corwin | Staff
  • About this deal:
    • This is priced $90 lower (13.8% savings) than the $649 list price.
    • Refer to the forum thread for additional details and discussion.
  • About this product:
    • This has a 4.5 out of 5 star overall rating on Amazon based on over 840 reviews.
  • About this store:
  • No Longer Available:
    • Amazon has QNAP TS-653D-4G 6-Bay NAS Enclosure on sale for $559. Shipping is free.

Original Post

Written by vns1

Community Voting

Deal Score
+30
Good Deal
Visit B&H Photo Video

Price Intelligence

Model: QNAP TS-653D-4G 6 Bay NAS for Professionals with Intel® Celeron® J4125 CPU and Two 2.5GbE Ports

Deal History 

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Post Date Sold By Sale Price Activity
11/29/21Amazon$550
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Dead_Cow
475 Posts
148 Reputation
Not well at all. I have 3 QNAP devices at home (TVS-672XT, TVS-471 and a TS-451D2-2G). The TS-451D2-2G is a 4 bay celeron that I decked out with 32GB of RAM. I have recently transcoded all my movies and shows to HEVC (h265). You could clean up all your media, and store it all your on this, then make sure you're streaming to modern devices only and turn off transcoding entirely. If you do that, this will be fine, otherwise, you'll need to turn off some features of Plex (like video thumbnail creation) because this will have a hard time getting out of it's own way. Even my TVS-672XT that's upgraded to an i7 with 64GB of RAM has a hard time with multiple 4k streams, but the truth is you don't need to transcode in many cases anymore if you've chosen the correct media formats to store in, then, install TDARR and let it go to town turning your entire collection to that format. A side benefit of transcoding to h265 is a massive space savings. I went from my collection being 24TB to 13TB with no perceivable loss to visual clarity. If you're not running some million dollar AV system, I have some 4k movies encoded with h265 and 5/1 AC3 that are less that 2GB in size. Also, make sure to remove all burned in subtitles. That's a huge cause for transcoding.

Sorry for rambling. TL;DR: this is completely inadequate for transcoding really anything (not just 4k), but you shouldn't need too nowadays.
pwnbox
18 Posts
10 Reputation
I've had this unit for a while now. And I think you got a defective unit; unless if you're speaking from personal experience and not collection of angry reddit posts - I would look to replace it.

QTS isn't terrible, I do think it's behind Synology or the others that you mentioned if you're just looking to NAS this device.

QNAP does have a lot of zero days - but it's pretty well documented about not opening up anything to internet on their forums, well any forums for QNAP due to this. Pretty standard for any type of App/Hardware these days to limit the attack surface as much as possible.

There's the third-party / maintained QPKG repos out there to help. But yeah, they're slow to update and they're third-party. I didn't find them clunky and worked as expected.

I migrated all my Apps (Sonarr/Radarr/Sab/PiHole...ect) to container station via Portainer / Compose. I do think Container Station would be okay but just for overall management Portainer is the way to go.

Not sure where you're getting the VM loading times and specifically for Home Assistant, as that's how I'm running my HA instance. It's back up in less than minute during updates via the App or system reboots (well maybe slightly on VM restart, def no where near 20mins)

I also have an Microsoft Intune/ConfigMgr lab running in there with multiple different client OS's for testing; Ubuntu and Ansible/Teraform lab - they're all speedy, I haven't found any issues.

I've updated the memory to 32gigs and haven't had any Kernel Panics / stops. The VMs see the memory I assigned and it's def over the allotted 8gbs.


I don't know, I just haven't had the experience you've outlined above with mine. I've maxed out the drives with 14TB disks, 32gb RAM. I did a lot of research when I first started looking and it was between this guy and a 6 bay Synology, I ended up on the QNAP just for the hardware and I knew coming in EVERYONE said QNAP software sucks and is inferior to Synology - I was worried I was going to see that. I've never used Synology - but I can say that I haven't felt I couldn't do something I wanted or had issues with so far. I don't regret going QNAP.
vns1
97 Posts
50 Reputation
Just to mention a few things that seem to be lost:
1. This is a Celeron CPU - so, expectations need to be adjusted accordingly. Don't expect some tremendous performance with transcoding videos for example - but it will still do the job.
2. RAM - it does support and can use 32GB (which is super handy if you want to run a few containers). That's what I have, tested and confirmed. The caveat - you must use dual-rank memory modules. Here are the details: https://forum.qnap.com/viewtopic.php?t=165535
3. Fan noise - I have the 4-drive unit, fan is practically silent.
4. HDD temperatures - it is more than good. To do initial burn-in on the drives I ran ShredOS (similar to DBAN) to fill 4x16TB drives multiple times with random data. This was a 100% load for the drives for over a week - which is way beyond what's typical for a NAS - and all drives kept 40-41C and the entire system performed flawlessly.
5. Do you need 2.5G Ethernet ports - YES! With 4 drives at 160-180MB/sec I was getting 600-700Mb/sec combined easily from the drives. Your bottleneck is the LAN port. Even if you bridge the two you will still hit the limit.
6. Extra PCIe slot is very handy. I was surprised that a 10GBps Mellanox 311 SFP+ card was literally a plug-and-play thing. It was fully supported and just worked.
Minor annoyance with that - you will have to mess with the low-profile bracket as QNAP decided to use a non-standard bracket. Not that it was a big deal - I had to bent one bit, and drill a new hole for the screw (as I insisted on it being installed and screwed properly). You could just install it without the bracket and it will be mostly fine - after all you will likely put the NAS somewhere once and never move it from there.
7. The 6-drive unit is extra tempting as drives are really cheap those days. So, instead of transcoding or do other magics to reduce file size I would just get a few extra drives.

74 Comments

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Dec 13, 2022 07:25 AM
580 Posts
Joined Dec 2010
Consumer1337Dec 13, 2022 07:25 AM
580 Posts
Can it just run on 2 drives?
Dec 13, 2022 08:23 AM
840 Posts
Joined Aug 2008
SilentJudgeDec 13, 2022 08:23 AM
840 Posts
Quote from Consumer1337 :
Can it just run on 2 drives?
Yeah. You can even run it on 1 drive.
Dec 13, 2022 11:51 AM
660 Posts
Joined Nov 2010
erkme73Dec 13, 2022 11:51 AM
660 Posts
How would this handle 4k Plex transcoding,
Dec 13, 2022 12:42 PM
82 Posts
Joined May 2008
zhsaDec 13, 2022 12:42 PM
82 Posts
It look like you can install 32GB memory and boot it up, but the precessor is only able to use 8GB anyway
4
Dec 13, 2022 01:18 PM
475 Posts
Joined Oct 2004
Dead_CowDec 13, 2022 01:18 PM
475 Posts

Our community has rated this post as helpful. If you agree, why not thank Dead_Cow

Quote from erkme73 :
How would this handle 4k Plex transcoding,
Not well at all. I have 3 QNAP devices at home (TVS-672XT, TVS-471 and a TS-451D2-2G). The TS-451D2-2G is a 4 bay celeron that I decked out with 32GB of RAM. I have recently transcoded all my movies and shows to HEVC (h265). You could clean up all your media, and store it all your on this, then make sure you're streaming to modern devices only and turn off transcoding entirely. If you do that, this will be fine, otherwise, you'll need to turn off some features of Plex (like video thumbnail creation) because this will have a hard time getting out of it's own way. Even my TVS-672XT that's upgraded to an i7 with 64GB of RAM has a hard time with multiple 4k streams, but the truth is you don't need to transcode in many cases anymore if you've chosen the correct media formats to store in, then, install TDARR and let it go to town turning your entire collection to that format. A side benefit of transcoding to h265 is a massive space savings. I went from my collection being 24TB to 13TB with no perceivable loss to visual clarity. If you're not running some million dollar AV system, I have some 4k movies encoded with h265 and 5/1 AC3 that are less that 2GB in size. Also, make sure to remove all burned in subtitles. That's a huge cause for transcoding.

Sorry for rambling. TL;DR: this is completely inadequate for transcoding really anything (not just 4k), but you shouldn't need too nowadays.
Last edited by Dead_Cow December 13, 2022 at 05:21 AM.
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Dec 13, 2022 01:48 PM
809 Posts
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This comment has been rated as unhelpful by Slickdeals users.

Dec 13, 2022 03:12 PM
664 Posts
Joined Nov 2007
xtreme571Dec 13, 2022 03:12 PM
664 Posts
Quote from Dead_Cow :
Not well at all. I have 3 QNAP devices at home (TVS-672XT, TVS-471 and a TS-451D2-2G). The TS-451D2-2G is a 4 bay celeron that I decked out with 32GB of RAM. I have recently transcoded all my movies and shows to HEVC (h265). You could clean up all your media, and store it all your on this, then make sure you're streaming to modern devices only and turn off transcoding entirely. If you do that, this will be fine, otherwise, you'll need to turn off some features of Plex (like video thumbnail creation) because this will have a hard time getting out of it's own way. Even my TVS-672XT that's upgraded to an i7 with 64GB of RAM has a hard time with multiple 4k streams, but the truth is you don't need to transcode in many cases anymore if you've chosen the correct media formats to store in, then, install TDARR and let it go to town turning your entire collection to that format. A side benefit of transcoding to h265 is a massive space savings. I went from my collection being 24TB to 13TB with no perceivable loss to visual clarity. If you're not running some million dollar AV system, I have some 4k movies encoded with h265 and 5/1 AC3 that are less that 2GB in size. Also, make sure to remove all burned in subtitles. That's a huge cause for transcoding.

Sorry for rambling. TL;DR: this is completely inadequate for transcoding really anything (not just 4k), but you shouldn't need too nowadays.
I've got Synology with same processor, and it transcodes two 4k streams down to 1080p without breaking a sweat.

Edit: Quick google-fu shows it may be that only native QNAP applications can access the iGPU for hardware transcoding on QNAP devices. Ouch.
Edit2: I've been corrected by post #19 in this thread that this unit can transcode in Plex. User of post #19 states personal experience with a 4bay unit from this series. Link to post.
Last edited by xtreme571 December 13, 2022 at 10:07 AM.
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Dec 13, 2022 03:28 PM
12,457 Posts
Joined Jan 2007
MadPupDec 13, 2022 03:28 PM
12,457 Posts
No amateur NAS users need apply.
Dec 13, 2022 03:50 PM
955 Posts
Joined Nov 2003
tearsintherainDec 13, 2022 03:50 PM
955 Posts
I own a QNAP w/ plex and like it but have it set to local LAN only, QNAP has a massive security problem and thousands of people have been hit by ransomware, hijaacks, etc over the years as the systems security is kinda shit if you use their cloud service or let your QNAP be exposed to the internet.

If you are cool with not letting anyone outside your house access the QNAP (turn off myCloud, turn off UPNP) then it seems like a great device. I think most people wouldn't find a backup/nas that has limited internet access very useful though.

Personally in the future I'm gonna build out my own custom mini PC NAS with TrueNAS or unRAID so I can do exactly what I want with drives, but I think a synology is better as your "first" NAS. I love having one though, I put my torrent client on it, have all my movies and TV shows on it and it works great in the house over WiFi. With modern TV smart apps you just install Plex and don't need transcoding or anything, the only downside is DoVi (DolbyVision) encoded MKVs won't play but they will if you use an Apple TV+ or nvidia Shield TV. Other devices and native apps - PS5, xbox, roku, Plex app, Kodi app, chromecast - don't play Dolby Vision encoded streams.

HDR/HDR10 work perfectly fine in the plex app though so if you just avoid DoVi encodes you are fine.
2
Dec 13, 2022 04:03 PM
809 Posts
Joined Nov 2018
ElatedWalrus2609Dec 13, 2022 04:03 PM
809 Posts
Quote from MadPup :
No amateur NAS users need apply.
I have had a WD PR4100 16GB RAM for years now. Wouldn't even consider another brand, runs Plex like it was made for it.. Good friend of mine swears by Synology and honestly I hear good things about them from end users as well. I more or less co-mod a computer forum of 61K members and growing and ran another of 10K+ in the late 90's.. I have been in the hardware side of IT for 20+ years, retail and commercial. Currently I work in provisioning advanced networking. The reason I question the amount of cooling and how they cram the drives together is this. Heat outside of physical damage (dropping) is the enemy of hard drives. There is a reason why a the major NAS hard drive manufacturer chooses to give a little cooling room around hard drives in the enclosure. Again in order to make the enclosure smaller QNAP is exposing the installed electronics to excessive heat which can affect performance Lastly why would "Two 2.5GbE Ports" be of any value on a NAS? Every NAS I have used is always throttled by the bandwidth available from the Hard Drives which is substantially less. Whatever brand NAS you settle upon keep cooling and internal temperatures high on the wish list. You are in it for the long haul and most consider NAS as an archival storage appliance as well.
4
Dec 13, 2022 04:04 PM
1 Posts
Joined Nov 2019
NeatRock1200Dec 13, 2022 04:04 PM
1 Posts
Quote from erkme73 :
How would this handle 4k Plex transcoding,
No issues
1
Dec 13, 2022 04:04 PM
971 Posts
Joined Dec 2011
aztecsurfDec 13, 2022 04:04 PM
971 Posts
Quote from Dead_Cow :
Not well at all. I have 3 QNAP devices at home (TVS-672XT, TVS-471 and a TS-451D2-2G). The TS-451D2-2G is a 4 bay celeron that I decked out with 32GB of RAM. I have recently transcoded all my movies and shows to HEVC (h265). You could clean up all your media, and store it all your on this, then make sure you're streaming to modern devices only and turn off transcoding entirely. If you do that, this will be fine, otherwise, you'll need to turn off some features of Plex (like video thumbnail creation) because this will have a hard time getting out of it's own way. Even my TVS-672XT that's upgraded to an i7 with 64GB of RAM has a hard time with multiple 4k streams, but the truth is you don't need to transcode in many cases anymore if you've chosen the correct media formats to store in, then, install TDARR and let it go to town turning your entire collection to that format. A side benefit of transcoding to h265 is a massive space savings. I went from my collection being 24TB to 13TB with no perceivable loss to visual clarity. If you're not running some million dollar AV system, I have some 4k movies encoded with h265 and 5/1 AC3 that are less that 2GB in size. Also, make sure to remove all burned in subtitles. That's a huge cause for transcoding.

Sorry for rambling. TL;DR: this is completely inadequate for transcoding really anything (not just 4k), but you shouldn't need too nowadays.
Good information. Are you stripping out the high def audio codecs to save on space? Atmos, Dolby HD, etc? I am trying to retain those and keep the size down on each file. Thanks. 👍
Dec 13, 2022 04:13 PM
475 Posts
Joined Oct 2004
Dead_CowDec 13, 2022 04:13 PM
475 Posts
Quote from aztecsurf :
Good information. Are you stripping out the high def audio codecs to save on space? Atmos, Dolby HD, etc? I am trying to retain those and keep the size down on each file. Thanks. 👍
I use radarr to upkeep things. So I aautomatically strip out the high def audio after I've had it around for a while (a month or so), but initally, no, I keep that all. That results in much higher file sizes, but not tremendous. The largest file I have now is 23GB and is 4K, EAC3 Atmos 5.1, but comparitively, the next file size down is 17GB 4K TrueHD Atmos 7.1, but that's an extended edition movie running 3h 21m. The files sizes really have a lot to do with the video bitrate of the file, which I have TDARR maintain when it converts. I've found the most important thing to do to prevent transcoding is to strip data and subs. You can (almost) always stream the subs if you really need them.
Last edited by Dead_Cow December 13, 2022 at 08:41 AM.
Dec 13, 2022 04:20 PM
475 Posts
Joined Oct 2004
Dead_CowDec 13, 2022 04:20 PM
475 Posts
Quote from xtreme571 :
I've got Synology with same processor, and it transcodes two 4k streams down to 1080p without breaking a sweat.

Edit: Quick google-fu shows it may be that only native QNAP applications can access the iGPU for hardware transcoding on QNAP devices. Ouch.
My main point was that if you have your collection setup correctly that transcoding is completely unneccecary on most devices and computers newer than 3-4 years old. I don't transcode anything and have had up to 10 streams running at the same time with the only limiting factor being outbound bandwidth. CPU doens't even blink anymore. So if you're willing to put a few automations into your media routine, it's kind of a moot point. You shouldn't need a GPU at all. Let the client handle the decoding entirely.

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Dec 13, 2022 04:36 PM
664 Posts
Joined Nov 2007
xtreme571Dec 13, 2022 04:36 PM
664 Posts
Quote from Dead_Cow :
My main point was that if you have your collection setup correctly that transcoding is completely unneccecary on most devices and computers newer than 3-4 years old. I don't transcode anything and have had up to 10 streams running at the same time with the only limiting factor being outbound bandwidth. CPU doens't even blink anymore. So if you're willing to put a few automations into your media routine, it's kind of a moot point. You shouldn't need a GPU at all. Let the client handle the decoding entirely.
Some TVs, even new ones cannot playback most files natively. I have LG G1 and that thing cannot natively playback H265 files with 7.1 audio properly. LG lists the TV can playback 4K H265 up to 60Mbits/sec, but the reality is different. Most devices struggle with HDR content and tone mapping.

Plus most people have video catalog with variety of media and do view their content on-the-go where bandwidth may play a bigger role than native playback. Most of the time, you cannot stream 4k HDR content on a mobile signal natively even if the device is capable.

Sure, it would be wonderful for all of us to have devices, connectivity and bandwidth for native playback of 4K HDR 10bit content, but that is not the case. Transcoding solves all those issues as it can adjust video output on the fly.

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