QNAP TS-328 3-bay NAS Review

QNAP's TS-328 is a compact and quite attractive looking NAS with its white front bezel and side panels with silver grey power and USB copy buttons. Dominating the left side of the front bezel are the six indicator LEDs (reading from top to bottom they are: status, LAN, USB and three for drive activity). We say dominating, as these LEDs certainly grab your attention as they seem so much bigger than normal. So big in fact that we actually measured them – 4mm x 3mm. One thing is for certain you're not likely to miss them blinking away.

The real panel is dominated by the grill for the 90mm cooling fan. To the right of the grill sit all the external ports; 3.5mm speaker and line out jacks, two Gigabit LAN ports, which is a nice surprise for this level of NAS, and single USB 2.0 and 3.0 ports.

To get to the internal drive cage and the three drive trays you undo the three small thumbscrews on the rear panel and slide the two sides of the TS-328 apart. The hard drive trays are held in place by a simple but effective pair of sprung clips on the front of each tray. Pushing on the clips allows you to pull a drive tray out.

 
The back of the drive tray is open, allowing the tray side arms to open out a little to get the drive in. Each side arm has a pair of pins that fit into the side mounting holes of the hard drive. It's a little more flimsy than a standard NAS drive tray but it works well enough.

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