QNAP TS-464

Designed for small businesses and video-centric home enthusiasts, the QNAP TS-464 (A$799) is a versatile four-bay network attached storage (NAS) device that delivers swift file transfer performance and provides an excellent assortment of I/O ports—including a pair of multi-gig Ethernet ports, four USB ports, and an HDMI video output. The TS-464's solid performance, expandability, and generous app catalog earn it an Editors' Choice award for multi-bay NAS drives.

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Design and Features

The TS-464 measures 6.6 by 6.6 by 8.9 inches (HWD) and uses the same basic chassis design as the two-bay TS-253D-4G reviewed here last year, though it's wider to accommodate four drive bays and features a black and gold color scheme instead of the black and gray finish of the TS-253D-4G.

Behind a removable front panel are four drive bays. The bays support hot-swapping and their tool-free drive sleds will accommodate either 2.5- or 3.5-inch drives. Like almost every NAS device, the TS-464 doesn't come with hard drives, so be prepared to supply your own. To the right of the removable panel are LED indicators for power and status, LAN and USB activity, and drive activity. Here you’ll also find a USB 3.2 Type-A port, a power button, and a One-Touch Copy button for use with a USB external drive.

The rear panel is home to two 2.5GbE LAN ports, which you can aggregate to create a 5GbE connection; a second USB-A 3.2 port; two USB 2.0 ports; an HDMI 2.0 output; a power jack; and a reset button. There's also a cover for the low-profile PCI Express slot that can accommodate a 10GbE network card, a QNAP QM2 card (essentially, a PCI Express SSD on an expansion card used to accelerate NAS performance), or a USB 3.2 Gen 2 (10Gbps) card. A single 120mm fan keeps internal components from overheating.

The TS-464 offers a total potential peak internal capacity of up to 88TB when configured with four 22TB drives. It supports JBOD, Single, RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 5, RAID 6, and RAID 10 configurations. Under the hood are a quad-core Intel Celeron N5095 processor, 4GB of DDR4 memory (expandable to 16GB), and 4GB of flash memory. The NAS uses Intel's UHD Graphics engine for real-time video transcoding and has two M.2 slots suitable for solid-state drive storage or SSD caching. Alternatively, you can use a slot to install a Google Edge TPU card to speed up face and image recognition when using the QuMagie photo-management app.

The NAS is managed using the QTS 5 operating system, which offers a Windows-like desktop with colorful tiles for easy navigation. When you first fire up the OS, the desktop is populated with tiles for Control Panel, File Station, Storage & Snapshots, App Center, Help Center, HDMI Display Applications, Virtualization Guide, and iSCSI & Fibre Channel. A new tile is added each time you download a program from the App Center.

The Control Panel tile opens a screen with submenus for configuring system settings, assigning user privileges and quotas, creating shared folders, and configuring network and file services. You use the File Station tile to create links to files, share folders and files, and view files and folders that other NAS users have shared with you. The Storage & Snapshots tile opens a screen where you can create storage pools and volumes, manage drive health, create and manage snapshot backups of each storage pool, and configure external storage devices.

The HDMI Display Applications screen provides a portal where you can install and access multimedia applications such as VideoStation, MusicStation, and Spotify. Tap the iSCSI Storage tile to create iSCSI targets and LUNs; tap the Virtualization Guide to view information on using the TS-464 in a Citrix XenServer, Microsoft Hyper-V, or VMWare vSphere environment. Finally, the Help Center tile opens a screen where you can access a QTS manual and other online resources and connect to a help desk.

The QNAP App Center tile takes you to a catalog of 107 apps, with new ones added from time to time. The apps let you use the TS-464 as a media server, a cloud server, a backup server, or a surveillance station to manage your IP cameras. It also offers dozens of business, entertainment, security, and home automation apps. By comparison, the Synology DS1522+ offers 99 apps, and the TerraMaster F5-422 gives you 75.

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Testing the QNAP TS-464: Setting the Pace

Setting up the TS-464 was easy. I installed four 10TB Seagate IronWolf drives, connected the NAS to my router, and powered it up. I opened a web browser on a desktop PC connected to the router and entered the https://install.qnap.com URL. This launched a web page showing the NAS model number, its IP and MAC addresses, the current firmware version, and an Initialize button. I tapped the latter, entered my QNAP ID (if you don't have one, you can create one here), and tapped Start Smart Installation when prompted.

I updated the firmware, waited a couple of minutes for the device to restart, gave the NAS a name and password, specified my time zone, and selected DHCP for my connection method. I tapped Initialize, and after several minutes the new settings were applied, and the QTS desktop opened to the Storage and Snapshots screen. Here, I created a storage pool with a RAID 5 volume, which provided a total of 27.27TB of available storage. Once configured, the drives needed a little more than 14 hours to synchronize before I was ready to test.

To test file transfer performance, we clock read and write speeds while transferring a 4.9GB folder containing a mix of music, video, photo, and office document files between the NAS and a desktop PC wired to the same network. The TS-464 delivered quiet, quick file transfers; its score of 89MBps in the write test outperformed the Asustor AS6704T (87MBps), the ioSafe 1520+ (85MBps), and the TerraMaster F5-422 (80MBps), but just barely trailed the Synology DS1522+ (90MBps).

The TS-464 took top honors with on the read test with a score of 90MBps, outpacing the Asustor AS6704T (87MBps) and squeaking by the other three drives in our test pool, all of which scored 89MBps.

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Verdict: A Choice Pick Among Four-Bay NAS Drives

High-speed networking connections, onboard 4K video transcoding, and plenty of ports including an HDMI monitor output make the four-bay QNAP TS-464 an excellent choice for SMB or home users seeking a network-attached storage solution with strong multimedia chops. It's a cinch to install and manage, offers a generous app catalog, and proved to be a strong performer in our file transfer tests. All this earns the TS-464 an Editors' Choice among multi-bay NAS drives, though if your needs tilt toward maximum capacity and scalability, another Editors' Choice winner, the Synology DiskStation DS1522+, is worth strong consideration, too. It offers five bays and several expansion ports.