StorageMeta

DAS QNAP TR-004-Review

QNAP expands its offering of massive storage for domestic use as well as for small and medium-sized companies. The model with which we are today is the DAS QNAP TR-004, which unlike NAS, connects via USB to our computers.

We thank QNAP for providing the product to us for review.

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Unboxing

The box that the DAS QNAP TR-004 comes in.

Opening the box. The different components are perfectly protected with plastic and foam.

The DAS QNAP TR-004, the connection cable to the electrical network and a box with instructions and other components.

The instructions and the warranty, the electrical connection cable and the USB 3.2 cable to connect it to any device.


Design

Front look at the DAS QNAP TR-004. We see the four storage drives in the four bays.

Rear of the DAS. We see the huge fan, the switch to make it work, and the switches to change the type of storage next to the USB-C cable connection.

One of the sides.

Top look. On the sticker next to the back it tells us how to place the switches to change the storage system.

Pulling out one of the four plastic caddies.

A look at one of the four plastic caddys that the DAS QNAP TR-004 comes standard with. We see that they have anti-vibration rubbers to ensure the stability of the hard drives and their integrity to avoid damage.

The sticker that tells us how and in which modes we can change, in case we are interested in some type of configuration in RAID, or in JBod.

Bottom side of the DAS. All four temples have a non-slip rubber.

Look inside. We see its circuitry and the space it has for ventilation and air to flow.

Part of the lower side in which we see the indicators of the safety lock.

Container structure for the four bays and storage units.

A look at the security lock on the DAS QNAP TR-004.


Software to manage the DAS storage unit QNAP TR-004, Eternal RAID Manager

DAS QNAP TR-004 firmware update notice.

Updating the firmware of the unit.

QNAP External Raid Manager

Information about the four hard drives that we have inserted into the unit. It gives us a capacity of just over 29 GB in RAID.


Gallery


Experience with DAS QNAP TR-004 and conclusion

First of all, we have found that it allows a configuration of up to 64 TB if we use four 16 TB storage units. It is a huge amount of storage for many companies, but that added space is never too much and allows you to have a surplus in the case of having to install virtual machines, Docker , applications ... We have also verified that in addition to RAID configurations showing the disks as individual, it allows using the configuration in jbod so that the files do not have to be divided in the case of needing space and thus makes it easier to navigate and organize between so much space.

Since there is a lot of talk about RAID or JBod mode for mass storage, we have tested its fast mode switch functionality. The box itself comes with a sticker that tells us how to put the switches to make the change from, for example, Raid-0 to Jbod, and this change takes about two minutes and then there is the process of formatting the partition.

Thanks to USB 3.2 we are promised a theoretical 20 GB / s write speed. But in our case the motherboard had USB 3.1, which offered us a speed between 284 to 360 MB / s.

But the most interesting thing about this DAS is that if we connect it via USB to another QNAP NAS, all the storage we have is added to our NAD. In this way we can expand the capacity of our NAS without having to buy a larger multi-bay model and with the addition that the DAS QNAP TR-004 already works as a huge external storage for many common devices. Of course, its reading and writing speed will be limited to the USB bottleneck itself with respect to the native bays of the NAS.

Another small inconvenience is that moving within the DAS folders has given us some latency of one or two seconds. This for a home user or a small business is small, but when numerous files have to be consulted in a larger company or workgroup, it can lead to a lot of accumulated wait time. With this, we can recommend it above all to create backup copies or to store less used files.

  • It can be configured in RAID-0, RAID-1, RAID-5 and RAID-10 mode in addition to Jbod.
  • Up to 64 TB of storage.
  • Quick change of storage mode.
  • The network plug is a very common one used by many routers.
  • QNAP NAS connection to expand your capacity without having to buy another NAS.
  • Very simple use and adapted to all types of devices.
  • If we don't have USB 3.2 on our motherboard, we're going to lose a lot of transfer speed.
  • Navigation within the DAS has some latency.
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Benjamin Rosa

Madrileño whose publishing career began in 2009. I love investigating curiosities that I later bring to you, readers, in articles. I studied photography, a skill that I use to create humorous photomontages.

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