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Model: QNAP TS-653D-4G 6 Bay NAS for Professionals with Intel® Celeron® J4125 CPU and Two 2.5GbE Ports
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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 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.
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.
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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.
Thanks for your grains of knowledge. Can you expand on the burned in subtitles? How can we do them instead that won't make streaming 4k worse?
I lost my life to the ransomware. Do not trust qnap
I've been wanting a NAS for a very long while, after stupidly assuming since my high end (at the time) Linksys router has a USB port they specifically mention for network media storage. And assumed it had some basic level of protection and got hit with ransomware, didn't lose anything important thankfully.
I really don't understand why so many people have these connected to the internet in the first place, nor why for such a price and internet traffic they can't even manage security at a Windows Defender level.
Honestly the biggest take away from this thread is try to find someone who knows what they are doing, with a huge NAS filled with content I like and just pay for access to theirs rather than buy and build one.
I don't get why people would like to pay $560 for what's effectively a Celeron PC? 2.5GbE cards are like $30 piece.
The Celeron is very efficient and uses little power. It also transcodes moderately well with quicksync. The difference between this and building your own, more powerful NAS at the same price is that the QNAP is simple and easy to setup for the average person. Most people don't need an i-series Intel processor or Ryzen in their NAS, and they don't want to fiddle with technical stuff, so getting a QNAP or Synology makes more sense for them. Sounds like you're more technically adept so it makes sense for you to build your own.
Last edited by CMarshall85 December 13, 2022 at 11:03 PM.
I have a QNAP 453Be and also an older synology. I was initially impressed by QNAP. But one of the biggest problems with QNAP is that it JUST DOESN'T GO TO SLEEP. It continues to chug along day in and day out. Drives are permanently spinning. It's noisy as hell in my computer room. I have no idea what it's doing permanently day in and day out. It's as if it's processing something but then I have nothing running. It scares the hell out of me. Believe me - I tried everything. At one time I even reformatted the whole thing (after painstakingly removing all data and setting it up again from scratch). That didn't help. Long threads on QNAP forums complaining about the same thing. The general consensus seems to be that sleep on QNAP is basically broken. (And if you use any docker container then basically don't even try; but it's broken even without that).
I'm no expert but from what I've read you don't want to spin down (and then spin back up) your drives in a NAS. Spinning them up and down will greatly increase the chances of mechanical failure. HDDs designed for NAS's are made to run 24/7.
The noise thing could be due to your specific drives. What drives are you using in your NAS?
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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 don't really understand the point of encoding to h265 if you have this. Why spend all that money for quality on par with steaming services? You might as well spend the money buying digital copies of all the movies you have saved on this device. The whole point of having lossless local copies is to enjoy that last 10% in improved quality, ie Dolby atmos + vision both at the same time.
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.
Great device. Paid abt this last year (2021) on BF., and is a decent price.
But not the best price-
**Three** months ago, Newegg had these for $430, but limited stock.
Didn't last long.
Some super lucky dudes got in on that one.
Are you sure $430 was for the 6-bay unit? (and not for the 4-bay, which was at that $430 price this year - for several days on amazon actually, and $399 last year)
I lost my life to the ransomware. Do not trust qnap
It's certainly not QNAP's fault if someone doens't know how to secure their device. Install Qfirewall. Allow access to the device by IP only. There's so much granular network stuff you can do to secure this or really any device. I'm not suggesting that having UPnP on by default was a good idea (they no longer do this), but it's still up to consumers to protect themselves and understand the tech (QNAP or any) they want to use. You can get a Cisco ASA and misconfigure it and be just as exposed.
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I agree with most of what you said, but there's no way your 4k h265 movie is good quality with only a 2GB file size.
I just went and checked. The one I was thinking of was "Stand By Me", however, that is 1080p, so I'm obviously incorrect about the file size for what I was thinking. My 4k stuff starts at 4.5GB, which is still pretty damn small.
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Sorry for rambling. TL;DR: this is completely inadequate for transcoding really anything (not just 4k), but you shouldn't need too nowadays.
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.
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
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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Bub
Sorry for rambling. TL;DR: this is completely inadequate for transcoding really anything (not just 4k), but you shouldn't need too nowadays.
I really don't understand why so many people have these connected to the internet in the first place, nor why for such a price and internet traffic they can't even manage security at a Windows Defender level.
Honestly the biggest take away from this thread is try to find someone who knows what they are doing, with a huge NAS filled with content I like and just pay for access to theirs rather than buy and build one.
The noise thing could be due to your specific drives. What drives are you using in your NAS?
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Sorry for rambling. TL;DR: this is completely inadequate for transcoding really anything (not just 4k), but you shouldn't need too nowadays.
But not the best price-
**Three** months ago, Newegg had these for $430, but limited stock.
Didn't last long.
Some super lucky dudes got in on that one.
But not the best price-
**Three** months ago, Newegg had these for $430, but limited stock.
Didn't last long.
Some super lucky dudes got in on that one.
or enjoy losing your data and/or sharing it with ROW
they have serious flaws practically monthly
who knows what they haven't detected yet
https://www.qnap.com/en/security-advisories
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