Recently we've looked at a number of QNAP NAS units aimed primarily at the SMB end of the market. This time we take a look at a unit at the other end of the spectrum - the entry-level, two bay TS-228A aimed at home users. The TS-228A is an update to the previous TS-228 with a faster & more capable processor and more modern memory. The TS-288 used a 32-bit 1.1GHz dual cored Realtek RTD1195PN CPU with 1GB of DDR3 memory, whereas the TS-228A uses a Realtek RTD1295 which is a 64-bit quad core CPU clocked at 1.4GHz. The amount of memory in the TS-228A is the same as the previous drive, 1GB, but is now DDR4-2133. Physical Specifications Processor: Realtek RTD1295 1.4GHz Memory: 1GB DDR4 2133MHz Gigabit Ethernet Ports: 1 Rear panel connectors: 2 x USB 2.0 Front panel connectors: 1 x USB 3.1 Gen1 RAID support: 0 & 1 Cooling: Active 1 x 60mm blower fan Drive Bays Supported: 2 Maximum hard drive size supported: 12TB Maximum Capacity: 24TB Internal File System support: EXT4 Dimensions (D x W x H): 125 x 90 x 188mm. Weight: 1.88kg. The TS-228A ships in a white box with a drawing of the unit on the front. The rear of the box has a multilingual list of the servers the NAS can be used for; File, FTP, Backup and Web, along with the fact that it can be remotely accessed. One side of the box has a small panel listing the box contents, while the other side has a snapshot specification panel. The box bundle contains all you need to get going with the NAS, including the 65W power adapter (Delta DPS-65VB LPS), a single LAN cable, four drive mounts and a quick installation guide. The TS-228A is a slim 2-bay tower NAS measuring just 188 x 90 x 125mm. It looks pretty stylish too, finished in white with a green top and black base. The white front has a black strip down the middle of the front bezel that holds the power and Quick Copy buttons (each with its own LED) as well as the indicator LEDs for system status, network and drive activity. The rear ports are all housed in a grey panel and include the power input, a Gigabit Ethernet port and a pair of USB 2.0 ports. One side of the TS-228A is dominated by a large sticker showing how to begin setting up the NAS with either the Quick Setup or the Cloud Key. The other side panel is blank apart from having the QNAP name embossed on it. To access the drive bays there is a tool free screw lock in the base of the unit. Once this is removed the two halves of the unit slide easily apart. The two drive bays use a simple but effective method to hold the drives in place. A pair of plastic retainers clip into the drive cage sides and a pair of moulded pins pass through the holes in the cage sides and into the mounting holes on the hard drive. Handily the drive cage mounting holes have rubber grommets fitted to help dampen down vibrations coming from the drive(s). To test the TS-228A we used the latest (at the time of writing) 4.3.4 (0597) version of QNAP’s QTS OS. QNAP’s QTS is a graphically-rich OS with links to the major functions appearing as icons on the main page. When you access the NAS for the first time you are met by the HelpCenter app. This comprehensive help utility provides access to the QTS manual, Online Resources including tutorials, video tutorials, FAQs and forums - or if all else fails you can connect to the QNAP Helpdesk for technical support. If you don't want to see this page every time you access the NAS, don't forget to uncheck the 'show on startup' option. Clicking the icon in the top right of the screen activates the Dashboard page which gives a snapshot of what’s happening with the NAS. Clicking on the menu icon in the top left-hand corner of the screen drops down a very useful side menu with the most commonly used control panel items. Any of these can be dragged and dropped onto the main page for easy access. Clicking on the control panel icon on the main menu screen brings the complete control panel window. Storage & Snapshots Manager is a powerful app that allows the status of all volumes and storage pools to be shown at a glance in a very clear, well laid out manner. Global settings for disks, storage and snapshots can all be adjust from within the management window. As with any NAS, disk management, RAID and volume creation are at the heart of things. Setting the storage space(s) up is pretty straightforward thanks to the clear and precise step by step setup pages in QTS. File snapshots used to be the preserve of high end business and enterprise systems but QNAP has brought it to this entry level NAS. Using snapshots you can record the state of the system and data at any time. Using snapshot protection, should files be accidentally deleted or modified you can quickly restore them from a previous point in time. The same applies to data lost through hard disk failures or malware infected networks. File Station, now up to version 5, is a complete file management system. It supports browsing and transfer of files from the NAS to public cloud services including Dropbox, Box, Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive and OneDrive for Business, Yandex Disk, Amazon Drive and HiDrive. It also allows the mounting of shared folders from a remote NAS to a local NAS via FTP and CIFS/SMB. Qfiling makes the job of archiving and organising large numbers of files much easier by allowing the setting of various filing conditions and schedules to enable automatic filing jobs. To access files from anywhere there is Qsync Central. Files added to the Qsync folder are available to the local NAS and all devices that are connected to it, including mobile devices. Backup Station allows the backing up of data with a wide range of options, including backup servers, cloud storage, and external devices. The One Touch button on the front bezel can be set up to either upload or download files/folders or backup the NAS to an external USB drive. In the Backup Station pages in the QTS you can set up exactly what you want the One Touch system to do. The Resource Monitor is a very useful tool, monitoring elements and offering detailed information on how the storage of the NAS is being used. It is divided into four sections; Overview, System (with separate tabs for the CPU, Memory and Network), Storage (with separate pages for pool, RAID and disk activities and how the storage space is being used) and Processes. App Center has over 160 apps to choose from covering everything from backups to home automation and pretty much everything in between. There are two ways of setting up the TS-228A, either online by entering the Cloud key which is on the side of the unit or by using QNAP’s Qfinder Pro utility which can be downloaded from the QNAP website. Qfinder Pro searches for QNAP devices on the network. Whichever way you choose to start, it’s just a simple matter of following the installation wizard. During the setup you can enable which OS cross-platform file management service you require - Windows (SMB/CIFS, File Station, FTP), Mac (SMB/CIFS, File Station, FTP) and Linux (NFS, SMB/CIFS, File Station, FTP). Once the TS-228A has finished setting up, you can then access the login screen. The login page can be customised to add your own photographs or corporate logo to the photo wall and messages can be added to the page as well. To test the TS-228A we used a pair of WD 6TB Red drives (WD60EFRX, 5,400rpm class, 64MB cache), built into all the RAID arrays supported by the device - RAID 0 and 1. Software: Atto Disk Benchmark. CrystalMark 3.0.3. IOMeter. Intel NASPT. Crystalmark is a useful benchmark to measure theoretical performance levels of hard drives, SSDs and other storage devices.We are using V3.0.3. There's nothing to separate the two arrays when it comes to read performance with RAID 0 having a slight advantage when it comes to write performance. The ATTO Disk Benchmark performance measurement tool is compatible with Microsoft Windows. Measure your storage systems performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. Several options are available to customize your performance measurement including queue depth, overlapped I/O and even a comparison mode with the option to run continuously. Use ATTO Disk Benchmark to test any manufacturers RAID controllers, storage controllers, host adapters, hard drives and SSD drives and notice that ATTO products will consistently provide the highest level of performance to your storage. The sequential performance of the drive at 118MB/s is what you should expect from a single Gigabit Ethernet connection. Intel’s NASPT (NAS Performance Toolkit ) is a benchmark tool designed to enable direct measurement of home network attached storage (NAS) performance. NASPT uses a set of real world workload traces (high definition video playback and recording, video rendering/content creation and office productivity) gathered from typical digital home applications to emulate the behaviour of an actual application. We’ve used some of the video and office apps results to highlight a NAS device’s performance. HD Video Playback This trace represents the playback of a 1.3GB HD video file at 720p using Windows Media Player. The files are accessed sequentially with 256KB user level reads. 4x HD Playback This trace is built from four copies of the Video Playback test with around 11% sequential accesses. HD Video Record This writes an 720p MPEG-2 video file to the NAS. The single 1.6GB file is written sequentially using 256kB accesses. HD Playback and Record Tests the NAS with simultaneous reads and writes of a 1GB HD Video file in the 720p format. Content Creation This trace simulates the creation of a video file using both video and photo editing software using a mix of file types and sizes. 90% of the operations are writes to the NAS with around 40% of these being sequential. Office Productivity A trace of typical workday operations. 2.8GB of data made up of 600 files of varying lengths is divided equally between read and writes. 80% of the accesses are sequential. Photo Album This simulates the opening and viewing of 169 photos (approx 1.2GB). It tests how the NAS deals with a multitude of small files. The TS-228A shows consistent performance across both RAID arrays in the video tests of Intel's NAPST benchmark with the drives topping 100MB/s for all tests. Again in the Office tests of Intel's NASPT benchmark, the TS-228A shows good consistency across the two RAID arrays tested. IOMeter is another open source synthetic benchmarking tool which is able to simulate the various loads placed on hard drive and solid state drive technology. We set IOmeter up (as shown above) to test both backup and restore performance on a 100GB partition. QNAP's TS-228A had no problems dealing with our backup/restore test in either RAID array, with an average transfer rate of 100.19MB/s across the arrays. To test real life file/folder performance we use a number of different file/folder combinations to test the read and write performance of the NAS device. Using the FastCopy utility to get a MB/s and time taken for each transfer, the data is written from and read back to a 240GB SSD. We use the following files/folders: 100GB data file. 60GB ISO image. 60GB Steam folder: 29,521 files. 50GB Files folder: 28,523 files. 12GB Movie folder: 24 files – mix of Blu-ray and 4K files. 10GB Photo folder: 621 files – mix of .png, .raw and .jpeg images. 10GB Audio folder: 1,483 files – mix of .mp3 and .flac files. 5GB (1.5m pixel) image. BluRay Movie. Click to enlarge. The NAS handled our real life file transfer tests without any problems and showed very good consistency throughout all the tests. It was more efficient handing large files than small ones as can be seen by the comparing the results of the transfer tests for the 60GB Steam, 50GB file and 10GB audio folders against all the rest. We tested the peak power consumption of the NAS at the wall during a run of CrystalDiskMark 5.0.2 as this version of the benchmark runs the read and write benchmark suites separately, so it's easier to monitor how much power the device is drawing during each function. QNAP quotes power figures for the TS-228A as 5.14W during HDD standby, and 12.21W in operation. These figures are with a pair of 1TB drives installed. For our testing we used a pair of 6TB WD Red drives which are pretty frugal in their power requirements; 0.4W standby/sleep, 3.4W idle and 5.3 Watt active. In the past, entry level NAS units tended to be the runts of the litter - under-powered, poor performing creatures. But that is not so anymore and QNAP's TS-228A is a good example of how manufacturers' attitudes to the humble 2-bay NAS have changed. With a 1.4GHz 64-bit processor backed by 1GB of DDR4 memory, the TS-228A has enough grunt to perform the everyday functions of a NAS pretty well. Unfortunately if you have the feeling that a bit more memory might help the unit do the job a bit faster, then you are out of luck as the memory can't be upgraded or added to. A great many people will tell you that they don't see the point of a home NAS in today's world of the Cloud. But there are plenty of people around who aren't happy with the idea of their data being stored remotely, so if you are thinking about getting a NAS for the first time and are not sure about them, then something like the TS-228A is a good place to start. With a quick and easy to install OS that has a graphically rich interface with all the major functions represented by icons, it enables the first time user to get to grips with NAS ownership without being distracted by a plethora of different options. However, delving a little deeper using the control panel reveals just how feature rich the QTS OS still is. QNAP also regularly updates QTS, adding new features or refreshing ones that are already there. In sum, although aimed at the first time home user, with its support for 24TB of storage space and a powerful and feature rich OS, the TS-228A could even be the tool to use in a busy office network. We found the QNAP TS-228A for £157.82 on Amazon HERE. Pros Overall performance. QTS operating system. Tool free drives. Price. Cons No rear USB 3.0 ports. Doesn't support hot swapping of drives. Lack of advanced multimedia feature support. KitGuru says: The TS-228A maybe a simple 2-bay NAS , but thanks to QNAP's QTS software, a quad-core processor and DDR4 memory, it's a pretty powerful introduction to NAS ownership.