Introduction
Much like in a business environment but on a smaller scale, we as home users, have an insatiable appetite for data. Our internet connection bandwidth has increased to the point where some can get speeds of 1 gigabit per second. Application sizes have increased. Some game installs reach 50 GB in size. Digital cameras allow us to snap hundreds of pictures in a single session. Not only have our data needs changed, but our networking needs have too. Homes now have multiple PCs, phones, and tablets. How can you share your data with your family? A NAS or network attached storage device could very well be the answer. A NAS not only allows you to share you data with multiple users but can also help keep your data safe.NAS boxes are nigh on perfect devices for storing and streaming your multimedia collections,music, video, and photogoraph throughout your home. Traditionally, however, that streaming hasn't included UHD/4K/2160p video, which requires a fair bit of CPU power. Enter QNAP's TS-251A .This NAS features an Intel Celeron dual-core 1.66GHz and a boost speed of up to 2.48GHz CPU and supports up to 8 GB of RAM and 8 Terabyte drives.This model feature a unique USB QuickAccess port to directly connect them to computers via USB 3.0, offering great plug-and-use convenience to access files stored on the NAS.The TS-x51A uses the QTS 4.2.2 operating system with many feature-rich and productive apps.The NAS has the ability to connect to a TV or monitor and act as a media center/player and enjoy up to 4K UHD videos and the rich multimedia collections stored on their NAS or a light use PC for browsing the web.
Specifications.
Packaging & Contents
The TS-251A ships in a brown box with a small list of specifications, features and capabilities printed on it.There is a small product sticker on the front of the NAS that details the specifications and features.
After lifting the top box cover, we will get to see a 'Welcome" message along with some hints to several Internet resources.
Inside, the TS-251A is tucked away in a foam shell.
The accessories are packaged away in an additional cardboard box.
Except for the hard drives, the included accessories are all you will need to get the TS-251A up and running. The included accessories include, dual Ethernet cables, power supply, screws for SSDs and hard drives, a quick start guide, and a media center remote (RM-IR002).
IR remote controller (MCE compatible) included in the TS-251A.For everything the QNAP can do, this remote should come with basic play/pause/stop ffwd/rewind buttons. The remote works as advertised, but I think they went a little too minimalist on the design.
The Nas
First of all the TS-251A is easily recognized by its white paint job while previous models have been black.The QNAP TS-251A is a dual bay NAS and has a considerably smaller footprint than its 4 & 5 bay cousins. The NAS measures 168.5(H) x 102(W) x 225(D) mm (6.63(H) x 4.02(W) x 8.86(D) inch) and weighs in at about 5 lbs without the drives.Each HDD you install will add about 1-1/2 pounds, depending on your choice of drive.Most users will probably be looking at 2, 3, or 4TB drives for a NAS unit like this, and they’re heavier than most.
It still looks like a QNAP product, and white color looks good.The chassis is plastic instead of metal, and the hard disk trays do not have locks.
The white TS-251A also features a strip down the left hand side.The main entry points for cool air are through the front of the drive trays.The air that comes directly in the front passes over the HDDs and is exhausted out the rear of the unit by the large 70mm fan.The air coming in the side cools off the rest of the components on the main controller board, where the Intel Celeron CPU is the only component with a heatsink.
The right side does not come with the same ventilation holes.
The right side does, however, come with a sticker on the side that explains myQNAPcloud and gives you a QR code right on the side to get things setup. I removed the code out of the picture for obvious reasons, but you can tell that this is a consumer device when you have big stickers for easy setup if not a lot of people might never know the feature exists.
The bays don’t have any fancy locks or clips, the user simply needs to pull on the tab from the bottom and the drive slides out of place.Moving on, each drive also has its own activity and power light on the front of the case, while status,LAN and USB LED indicators sit on top.
The front of the NAS is where everything is going on. In the past, I have tested a few NAS around this size and they sometimes will have an LCD screen on the front for notifications but QNAP kept things simple with a vertical row of LED status indicators. You get one for each drive bay, one for an overall power indicator, one for LAN traffic, and the one showing when a USB device is active. This is enough to get the job done, especially when most people put a NAS like this up in a closet.
Below them is the built-in SD card reader that allows for easy import of your memory card content.
The power button for the TS-251A resides on the bottom left and glows blue when active,and there's a USB 3.0 port below it for easy data transfers from portable storage devices.
The big innovation the A series brings is what QNAP has dubbed a USB QuickAccess port.The USB QuickAccess port that allows you to complete the first-time installation and setup of your TS-251A without requiring network connectivity. The files and data stored on the TS-251A can also be directly accessed by using Qfinder Pro and a USB 3.0 A-Male to Micro B-Male cable or a USB 2.0 Micro B cable. Furthermore, you can assign access rights to users for different folders to prevent unauthorized access to important files.
Around the back the TS-251A features a pair of USB 3.0 ports,dual Gigabit LAN ports,one HDMI port,one maintenance port,power connector,an anti-theft K-Lock Security Slot and network settings reset switch.We can see the microphone and headphone port above the HDMI port.Cooling the TS-251A is a single 70mm fan which seems to work well.Although there isn’t any redundancy built into the TS-251A’s cooling setup, an alarm will sound in the event of a fan failure.The two USB 3.0 ports are perfect for USB printers, pen drives, and USB UPS connection as well as for keyboard and mouse when you’re using the HD Station. This is also where the HDMI port comes into play, as you can hook the TS-251a directly up to a monitor and use it for direct media playback of 1080p videos with 7.1 channel surround sound as well as run virtualization systems.
On the bottom side of the chassis we will find 4 rubber feet.
The bottom of the NAS also houses a locked symbol,and an unlocked symbol.The bottom sticker lets us know of the model code name, along with the power input requirements.There are only a few small ventilation holes on the bottom of the QNAP TS-251A Turbo NAS chassis.
Installation
Like all good NAS devices,the TS-x51A series all allow drives to be hot-swapped during operation.The use of individual, detachable 3.5-inch hard drive trays makes adding or removing storage capacity a breeze.
QNAP uses a newly-designed all-plastic tray to hold each drive on the TS-251A,which reduces cost and weight for the model line.
The drives get fixed with screws located on the bottom, not on the laterals.The drive trays easily accommodate 2.5″ drives without any additional hardware.Just use the correct mounting holes located on the bottom surface.QNAP used to not recommend mixing 3.5″ and 2.5″ drives in the same enclosure, but the advent of SSD caching in their business-class devices put an end to that restriction.
Each tray slides in with the HDD in the vertical position and locks firmly into place with the lever on the front.Key locks are not included to secure the trays in place, which may or may not be a security requirement for you.The trays are not labeled with the chassis slot number, which sounds like a small thing.They are all physically identical and you can mix and match them all you want, until you build a drive array and then you had better remember which one goes where.If you mix them up the NAS won't recognize the array,and worst case you could end up destroying data as you try to figure out which drive is which.I always keep a stack of sticky notes around whenever I have to pull drive trays out of a NAS,just to be sure.
Each internal drive can only be formatted with EXT4, although external drives can use FAT,NTFS,EXT3,EXT4,or HFS+ file systems.HFS+ is a newish capability for QNAP,and those who recognize it will know that it serves as the primary file system for Apple's OS X operating system.All Intel-based QNAP NAS units offer the additional option of AES 256-bit encryption and some of the larger units offer native CPU support for the recent AES-NI additions to the Intel64 instruction set.
Hardware
It's time now to strip down the NAS and discover what components it hides under the metal casing.To remove the single-piece top and side panel you need to remove two screws on the rear side first, and gently pull the panel up and back. You must be extra cautious during this procedure, as you risk breaking something.From this point on, it?s evident that QNAP has done a wholesale redesign on the chassis.
You can see that there's a lot of spare real estate on top of the drive cage. That will no doubt be put to use in other higher-end models for a display, and perhaps a CPU cooler. You can see why I say this is a whole new platform, right?Before we dig into the real innards of the QNAP TS-251A,here's the "drives eye" view of the NAS.All power for the drives comes through the PCIe connection on the main controller board and makes its way towards the power portion of the two SATA connectors.The signal portion of the SATA interfaces are located right below them, and although the backplane looks like it's just a passive connector board,there are two SATA controller chips located on the backplane.The cooling fan is partially visible from here, and there is plenty of wide open space in the chassis framework for the fan to pull air through.Of course, the hard drives will fill up most of that space,but it's good that they are the only thing holding back the airflow.
The mainboard of the TS-251A is small.
In the bigger slot the expansion card that holds all SATA ports is attached.
We've got two Gigabit networking ports running off the double Realtek RTL8111E controllers.
The settings are kept saved with the help of a CR2032 battery
The ASMedia ASM1182e is a PCIe switch. This chip takes one single PCIe x1 Gen 2 port and split it out into two PCIe x1 Gen2 ports.
The top of the motherboard is dominated by the pair of SODIMM slots.Our review sample came with a pair of Kingston CBD16D3LFS1KBG/2G 2GB DDR3L-1600 modules, giving a total of 4GB of system memory.
Here is the Realtek ALC262 4-Channel High Definition Audio Codec.
Here is the RTL8153 combined Ethernet and USB 3.0 controller.
There is an ITE IT8528E system management IC.
One heatsink cool down the cpu and chipset.Since the is TS-251A targeted at small businesses with simultaneous user access, it is powered by a 64-bit Intel Celeron N3060 1.6GHz dual-core CPU with a burst turbo frequency of up to 2.48GHz.The CPU alone is capable of transcoding 4K videos on-the-fly to smartphones, tablets, smart TVs and computers.
QTS Initialization
In order to start setting up the NAS, i will download and install the QNAP Qfinder utility which will list the current configuration.
The software will offer us a Quick Setup method, which is quite automated or Manual Setup.The next step would be to specify the NAS name inside the network, a password for the administrator account, an email address but also a desired disk configuration.
We will be able to leave the NAS obtain a network IP automatically or specify a manual configuration.
The firmware can be chosen to be uploaded automatically from the QNAP servers or we can specify a file we have already stored on our HDD.When the configuration has been completed and the NAS has automatically rebooted, we will be informed of the operation success.In QTS 4.2 the login screen has changed slightly, but the older version is also available/selectable from the software interface.
Next, we went ahead and defined a RAID Storage Pool, with a volume on it.
QTS also creates some default shared folders on the volume in order to speed things up.
Software Part I
After logging in, we will be welcomed with a fresh look of the whole desktop, including reworked icons, fonts, a more visible Recycle Bin, easy to access widgets and more.
For easy accessing the installed applications from a single screen desktop, we can always click in the top left corner.
Also, there's a slide-out dashboard that shows you system stats, which is well put together and very visually engaging...
From the Control Panel section, we will be able to control most of the systems settings and besides the slightly reworked icons, the arrangement has been kept the same as on the previous QTS.
The System Settings menu comes with sub-sections like General Settings, Storage Manager, Network, Security, Hardware and so on.
From the General Settings area, we can adjust GUI connection specific options,the DST,system time, Codepage options,Login Screen settings Password Strength or Password Strength.
QNAP NAS supports comprehensive RAID types, providing IT administrators with great flexibility in arranging suitable data protection levels. Besides being a secure place for data storage, the Turbo NAS also facilitates storage management and capacity allocation. The QTS Storage Manager makes it simple for IT administrators to create a unified Storage Pool to efficiently manage and deploy storage capacity.
Cache acceleration can be also configured from the same section.
The Network group gives you access to all TCP/IP settings.From the Network menu we can modify the current settings, also including Wi-Fi (with a compatible adapter), IPv6, Proxy, DDNS and so on.
QNAP provides lots of services to strengthen NAS security.Enabling this option can strengthen your system's security and deny repeated attacks. You can set conditions to block IP addresses or common communication protocols.From the Security area, we can define the firewall settings, enable Network Access Protection or define security certificates.
The Hardware menu allows us to enable/disable the Reset switch, configure the HDD standby mode, light signal alerts, enable write cache, turn on the LED light and adjust the brightness, work with the buzzer settings or adjust the Smart Fan settings.
The Power menu allows us to select the EuP mode, in order to achieve less than 1W consumption while the server is powered off, enable WOL, define Power Recovery behavior or the Power Schedule.
Software Part II
From the Notification menu, we can define a SMTP Server, a SMSC Server or work with Notification Alerts.
The Firmware Update menu permits bringing the system to the latest version.
Next I could mention the Backup/Restore menu which allows us to save the current configuration to a file just to be safe or we can restore the server to default settings, with or without erasing the data.
If we connect external storage on USB, printers or UPS system, then the next menu is what we should check out.
The System Status menu opens inside a separate window, with tabs like System Information, Network Status, System Service, Network Information or Resource Monitor.
The System Logs menu is the same story, with several tabs which open up inside a separate window: System Event Logs, System Connection Logs, Online Users or Syslog Client Management.
The Privilege Settings section will mostly take care of the users and their permissions, along with shared folders and Active Directory configurations.
Users and User Groups can be easily defined from the next two sub-sections.
Next, we can define disk Quota.
The TS-251A model can be also set as a Domain Controller, which is a very useful feature.The Domain Security menu also permits us to specify the type of authentication.
Next,we have the Network Services menu, which also comes with Network Recycle Bin and Qsync features.There is an FTP service option should you want to implement an FTP server on the NAS.
For syncing files between different devices we can always use Qsync.
Applications
Let's also take a look a little at some of the regular applications.We can install plenty from the interface even made by 3rd party developers.
Station Manager will allow us to access the regular QNAP applications directly, without the need of logging in to the main interface first.
First i would like to mention the Photo Station application which allows us to organize our private photo collection, but also run slideshows.Photo Station is a web album for you to organize and share photos and videos with your friends, family, and the world. You can also share the photos by email or publish them to popular social networking websites.
DLNA Media Server options are now also available.To allow DLNA media player to access and play the multimedia contents on the NAS via QNAP Media Server, enable QNAP Media Server and configure the Media Library for QNAP Media Server.
The Media Library service can scan multimedia files, such as photos, music and videos from designated media folders and index them into the media library for their display in multimedia applications. Thumbnails of photos, music and videos will be automatically generated to enhance your user experience as you browse through multimedia files in their corresponding applications.
Transcoding features:
Music Station will pick up our files from the respective folders, index them and pick up the album art from the web. Online radio can be also listened from the same interface via TuneIn.
A very important application is also File Station which helps us to organize the files on our NAS or transfer new ones from other different sources.
Backup Station helps replicating the data to another storage device, including cloud.Ηere we can also access the remote NAS to NAS backup function.
myQNAPcloud provides various remote access services, such as DDNS and CloudLink services. No matter where you go, you can always and securely access.
The RADIUS (Remote Authentication Dial In User Service) server feature of QNAP NAS provides centralized Authentication and Authorization management for computers to connect and use a network service.
After specifying the video folders, these will be indexed and shown inside the Video Station application.
After selecting a video file for playback, we will be asked to perform On-the-Fly Transcoding or open the original file.
If we get bored of Video Station, we can always install and run Plex, which opens up in a different browser tab.After we have specified the paths where the multimedia content is available, indexing will start and via Internet connection extra information will be picked up for each title.
Gmail Backup module is quite handy for having an extra backup for our mailboxes.
Besides using physical storage expansion enclosures, there is an additional option to expand NAS storage capacity. QNAP VJBOD (Virtual JBOD) is network-based JBOD, allowing you to expand the storage of a QNAP NAS with multiple QNAP NAS units. The TS-251A offers a high potential capacity for you to economically expand other QNAP NAS storage with VJBOD, and to create virtual storage pools and volumes on the virtual disks for operating NAS services.
4 K
To test transcoding and streaming I loaded the TS-251A with numerous test files, including about a dozen 2160p (UHD 3840x2160 and 4K 4096x2160) videos. I played files using Qnap’s Plex player streamed them to Windows Media Player augmented with the LAV DirectShow filters and as a control test, played them back directly using Media Player Classic Home Cinema. which was also set to use the latest version of the LAV filters.
Everything up to and including 1080p played or streamed fine. 2160p videos (AVC and HEVC) played well also, at least those limited to about 30 frames per second and around 6 megabits per second (HEVC) or 20Mbps (AVC). AVC is a lot easier to process than the more heavily compressed HEVC.
Mobile Apps
QNAP has also put to the users? disposal some free applications for mobile devices.On Android we have Qfile, which is a regular file browser for our NAS. The contents can be accessed only after we have provided valid login credentials.
Qmanager app is more advanced, since we can see lots of system statistics but also access the App Center, Backup Station, Download Station or other System Tools.
Resource Monitor will open when we click on the CPU/RAM dials to reveal information regarding the internal temperatures, CPU load, RAM and Swap degree of occupation, Disk usage, Bandwidth usage for each LAN port, currently running Processes, but also logged in Users.
App Center allows us to enable/disable the currently installed applications, but also browse more apps.
Backup Station allows accessing different backup functions like NAS to NAS, Rsync, RTTR and so on.
We can also perform downloads directly to our NAS from the mobile phone/tablet, but also search BT files.
From System Tools we can access connected external storage, block-list and more.
Qmusic app will let us browse through our libraries after we log in.
Qget will allow us to schedule the download tasks from Download Station, but also playback and save our favorite videos with the help of HappyGet II.
The free Qmusic app allows you to listen to your terabytes of music collection on the Turbo NAS anytime and anywhere.
VMobile is a mobile surveillance app for remote and wireless monitoring of IP cameras managed by the Turbo NAS with Surveillance Station Pro or the VioStor NVR.
Test System & Methology
I now begin the benchmark portion of this article, but first let me show you my test system:
OCZ Vertex 4 512GB SSD
Mainboard X79 MSI GD65 - Intel SATA 6G controller in AHCI mode
Processor Core i7 3960X at default configuration
Graphics Cards GeForce GTX 580
Memory 16 GB (4x 4096 MB) DDR3 1600 MHZ
Power Supply Unit 1200 Watt
Monitor Dell 3007WFP - up to 2560x1600
OS related Software Windows 7 64-bit SP1
Using two HDD WD Red 1TB 3.5 NAS Internal Hard Drives(WD10EFRX) for testing the NAS.
Performance
NASPT is an older tool, but still an industry standard when looking around the web at other trusted review sites. It’s for that reason that I still use it.Performance from the unit is strong.
To check the performance of the NAS I ran CrystalDiskMark 3.0.3 x64 with the default settings. This is a quick and easy storage drive benchmark utility that shows the peak sequential and random read/write speeds.
Sequential read and write performance on Atto are good.
Noise,Power Consumption & Temperature
The fan doesn’t spin much at lower loads, meaning the Nas is very quiet.At around 900 Rpm,the fan kicks in a little,becoming audible although never that intrusive.At full load,the fan spins much higher, and noise levels hit 33.9dBa.
The TS-251A draws 15W idling.The highest figure I saw was 23W while installing the QTS software.
The fan maintains good temperatures inside the chassis,and it spins up considerably in the upper part of overall load demand.
Conclusion
What a pleasure that was, to take QNAP’s TS-251A for a test drive. QNAP created an awesome and universally great NAS that will perform great in almost any scenario. Starting with the base, it comes with a powerful dual-core processor and 4GB RAM which is a powerful basis for anything. The CPU features a great hardware encryption engine and we saw performance results that barely were impacted by the encryption at all. The CPU also features a floating point unit that helps the overall performance but especially comes in useful for the media stations and thumbnail creation as well as transcoding.The Qnap TS-251A is a great little box, and streams multimedia as well as any NAS box in its class.If it was not for all the years I spent reviewing QNAP network attached storage systems, I would not even know where to start on the software side.Even after unleashing the art of copy-pasta year after year, it is impressive how the company manages to cram so many features into each software update, that even appending to my past work in just describing the changes require so much effort. Simply put, QTS 4.2.2 is one of the best, if not the best.The only issue I have with QTS is it is very slow to start up and shut down, but these systems are designed to run 24/7 anyway, so it is going to be no more than a minor inconvenience for most people.If you’re looking for a central repository for your songs, photos, and movies that any device in your house can acces, you could do far worse.Transcoding performance was great. I used a 4K video file and transcoded down to my Galaxy S7 and used the Multimedia application to view the video. With hardware acceleration on, CPU utilization didn’t rise above 40% during the 5 minute video. Video playback was smooth with no glitching or pausing. With hardware acceleration off, CPU usage jumped to 100% almost immediately and stayed there for the duration of the video. I would get about 10-20 seconds of video before it would pause and wait for the NAS to catch up.TS-251A is operating with the latest QTS version, which can offer us a smooth experience during NAS configuration but also during regular use. The App Center is there for us for installing all necessary application modules and apps are available from both QNAP and 3rd parties.QNAP delivers more software features than any other NAS manufacturer. Each package installs with just a few clicks, and a large support forum provides answers to questions that spring up along the way. Some applications focus on consumer tasks like video transcoding.It doesn’t just stop there, the TS-251A also comes with the unique Karaoke function thanks to the microphone jack and the line-out connector. Other applications focus on business requirements.Myfavorites, such as CloudLink, land somewhere in between.From volume snapshots over a complete backup and personal cloud solution to security, virtualization, surveillance, and expandability – it’s all there.
At the time of this article, the TS-251A can be found online for $312.The price isn’t the lowest you’ll find, but when we consider what we get for that price, it’s a great deal in my opinion.The TS-251A is about 20% cheaper than QNAP's higher end models. There is less number crunching power under the hood, but here is the deal: It runs the same operating system for the same software features, and the TS-251A still delivers in network throughput.QTS 4.2.2 does a lot to enhance the usability of the NAS. The combination of performance, features and usability earns the Qnap TS-251A the Bravo award. If you’re looking for a small NAS with great performance, the TS-251A is the whole package.
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