QNAP TS-364-4G 3-bay NAS Review

 
QNAP’s TS-364-4G is a quite attractive looking NAS with its white front bezel and side panels.  The TS-364 measures in at 142 × 150 × 260 mm (HxWxD). As you might expect that makes it wider than a two-bay unit but narrower than a four-bay NAS, however, that 260mm depth figure makes the NAS deeper than any 4-bay in QNAP's current SOHO/Home range by around 38mm, something to keep in mind if you are planning to put the NAS on a shelf.

Dominating the left side of the front bezel are the eight indicator LEDs (reading from top to bottom they are: status, LAN, USB and five disk activity (three for 3.5/2.5in drive activity and a pair for the M.2 slots). 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, but in any case you can turn them down in QTS OS. Under the indicators sit the silver-grey power and the USB One Touch Copy buttons. The copy button has a USB 3.2 Gen 1 port built into it.

The real panel is dominated by the grill for the 92mm cooling fan (92mm Y.S.Tech FD129225LB-Q, spin speed, 2,000rpm, 25.9CFM of air movement @ 16.7 dB(A).) To the right of the grill sit all the external ports; a pair of USB 3.2 Gen 2 (10Gb/s) Type-A ports under which sits the 2.5 GbE RJ45 port and finally an HDMI 1.4b port.

To get to the internal drive cage (which means no hot-swap support) and the three drive trays you undo the three small thumbscrews on the rear panel and slide the two sides of the TS-364 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 inside. 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. If you want to use 2.5in drives in the TS-364 then you will have to buy an optional 2.5″ drive tray base (TRAY-25-NK-BLK03).

The TS-364-4G comes with 4GB of DDR4-2666MHz memory but the NAS supports up to 16GB of RAM via two SODIMM slots. To access the slots, the drive trays have to be removed. The two slots support up to 16GB of DDR4-2666MHz memory.

In this photo, we've removed the drive cage to get a better view of the SODIMM slots and the M.2 drive ports. The TS-364 sports a pair of PCIe Gen 3 NVMe M.2 2280 slots which can be used for storage pools, cache acceleration or Edge TPU for AI image recognition. These slots are a tool-free design using a plastic clip to secure the drives rather than the usual small screw. So far good but now the not so good news is the slots are only running at x2 speed instead of the usual x4,  so the NAS won't be breaking any speed records, but even so, it's still really good to see them included.

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