We reviewed the QNAP TS-253B, a two-bay NAS system that supports drives up to 10TB and has the ability to add memory cards and USB ports, as well as HDMI video outputs.
The files are becoming heavier and large capacity solutions are required, especially for users who are dedicated to graphic design, video editing or similar. It also allows home users to share files with our family members or our smart devices or with friends over the internet. There are many solutions on the market, but today we bring you the complete analysis of the QNAP TS-253B, a NAS that has capacity for two hard disk drives and that additionally has support for memory cards or memory sticks.
The QNAP NAS arrives in a cardboard packaging, but perfectly protected, to prevent it from being damaged. The top of this device gives us product data, the amount of RAM in the unit and the serial number of the product in case we have to make use of the warranty. Inside the box, in addition to the QNAP TS-253B, we find the cables and the transformer for this device, the instruction manual, a quick guide, the sets of screws to anchor the hard drives, two sets of network cables and also a remote remote with the battery to make it work.
Our QNAP TS-253B is a two-bay NAS, which has an external casing made of aluminum, although the internal structure of this device is completely metal. One of the key points of this device are the internal components, which give us great quality and excellent performance. Aesthetics, despite the fact that these devices are not essential, has a great and elegant design, which allows us, at a given moment, to install it in our living room. The front of this NAS has a black design in most of the chassis and has an area where the USB and the card reader are, as well as the power button in metallic blue. The unit has dimensions of 168x105x226mm and has a net weight of 1.28Kg, without the storage units.
As a processor, the Intel Celeron J3455 has been used, a processor of the Apollo Lake family, which came on the market in Q3 2016 and is manufactured in 14nm. This processor is characterized by having four cores and four processing threads, working at a frequency of 1.5GHz and that can reach 2.3GHz. It has 2MB of L3 cache and the TDP is 10W. It has Intel HD Graphics 550 working at 250MHz, capable of reaching 750MHz and supports HDMI video output, supporting up to three displays and also supports FullHD, 2K and 4K resolutions. A great processor that will give us performance that meets the high demands of both ours and QNAP.
The system has 4GB of DDR3L RAM, although the processor supports a maximum of 8GB, so we can expand it at any given time. The memory expansion will be necessary if we want to use this NAS as a virtual system. Virtual machines are a very interesting solution for testing under operating systems, such as Linux or testing different distributions without having to be partitioning, reinstalling everything from scratch or changing the hard drive on our computer.
QNAP has completely remodeled the front of the QNAP TS-253B, which features an easy-to-remove panel for the hard drives, which supports 2.5 ”and 3.5” drives. The front has an interesting OLED screen that gives us a large amount of information, such as the system temperatures, the speed at which the fan works, the capacity of the hard drives, the name of the units and the amount of IP accessing the unit. On the right side, in blue, in addition to the power button and the quick backup button, we also find a USB 3.0 port, a USB Type-B connection, a card reader and also the status LEDs.
Regarding the QNAP TS-253B bays, for hard drives, they are fully compatible with hard drives from Western Digital, Seagate, Toshiba and other manufacturers, as well as 2.5 ”or 3.5” SSD drives. This NAS has a maximum capacity of 20TB, although the final capacity will always depend on the hard drives that we install. Because it is a high-end NAS, we can remove the hard drive bays hot without the system suffering any kind of damage or the data on the hard drives is corrupted.
Something very interesting about this QNAP TS-253B is that it allows the installation of expansion cards, supporting QNAP QM2 units that offer support for M.2 SSD caches or with 10GbE connectivity. Cards with extra RJ45 ports or a wireless network card can be installed. Regarding connectivity, it has a fan to cool the system, it has two 3.5mm jack inputs for microphone and one jack output for sound, two HDMI ports, which allows the system to be used as a multimedia unit, two RJ 45 Gigabit connectors and four USB 3.0 ports
QNAP itself offers us the QNAP Qfinder PRO software from the manufacturer's own website. This tool allows us to update the firmware of the QNAP TS-253B, detect all the devices on the network, start the session and show the system resources. The software is quite simple to use and allows us to configure it as we are most interested in and indicate if we need it for home use or for small businesses or freelance professionals.
We have before us a great solution, which will offer us performance and great versatility. The QNAP TS-253B offers us not only network storage, it also allows us to do it as a multimedia system playing 4K content, it has compatibility with hard drives of up to 10TB and a really low system consumption. Without a doubt we are facing an interesting and complete solution, with a built-in control, which allows us to have all the data in a unit connected to the network and share the data with our family and friends, if we see it as necessary or interesting. It is a very versatile solution that offers us everything we are looking for in a system like this.
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