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QNAP's TS-451D2-G4 is a dual-core powered, 4-bay NAS aimed at home and SOHO users. It features DDR4 memory, 4K/60Hz HDMI 2.0 output, real-time transcoding and AES-NI encryption. Priced around the £440 mark, we find out if it is worth buying.
At the heart of the TS-451D2 is an Intel Celeron J4025, a dual-core CPU that is rated at 2.0GHz (boosting up to 2.9GHz). The NAS is available in two versions, the D2-4G (the system we are looking at here) with 4GB of DDR4-2400 memory and the D2-2G with 2GB of memory. The NAS supports a maximum of 8GB of memory via the two SO-DIMM slots so if you need to upgrade to more memory for any reason, the option is there. It also supports an AES-NI hardware encryption engine and hardware-accelerated transcoding.
QNAP quotes Sequential throughput performance for the TS-451D2 as up to 220MB/s for reads and up to 224MB/s for writes with both LAN ports being used in Link Aggregation mode. With a single Ethernet connection, the official figures are 113MB/s reads and 112MB/s writes.
QNAP back the TS-451D2 with a 2-year warranty but this can be extended up to 5 years by purchasing a warranty extension.
Physical Specifications
- Processor: Intel Celeron J4025 2.0GHz (boosting up to 2.9GHz).
- Memory: 4GB DDR4-2400.
- Gigabit Ethernet Ports: 2.
- Rear panel connectors: 2 x 1GbE RJ-45, 3 x USB 3.2 Gen 1 (Type-A), 1 x HDMI 2.0.
- Front panel connectors: 1 x USB 3.2 Gen 1.
- RAID support: 0, 1, 5, 6, 10, JBOD.
- Cooling: Active, 1 x 120mm fan.
- Drive Bays Supported: 4
- Maximum hard drive size supported: 18TB.
- Maximum Capacity: 72TB.
- Internal File System support: EXT4.
- Dimensions (D x W x H): 219.4 x 160 x 165.3mm.
- Weight: 2.09kg.
The TS-451D2 comes in a compact box with a clear image of the unit on the front. Above the image to the right is a sticker that displays the amount of memory the NAS uses. Under the image, there is a line of text and a row of icons describing some of the hardware features of the TS-451D2.
One side of the box just has a group of transportation icons in the top left-hand corner with an SSD/HDD compatibility panel on the bottom. The other side has the same transportation icons plus a long line of icons representing the different standards that the device meets.
The box bundle for the TS-451D2 contains all you need to get started with the NAS; a single Ethernet cable, a pair of drive bay keys, 16 fixing screws for 3.5in drives and 12 for 2.5in drives, a 90W power adapter and a Quick Installation Guide.
The TS-451D2 is a compact tower NAS with a metal chassis supporting four vertically mounted drive bays. To the left of the drive bays are all the indicator LEDs (Status, LAN, USB, and four drive activity) as well as the power button, the one-touch copy button, and its associated USB 3.1 Gen 2 Type-A port. How this button handles data from an external drive can be configured in the QTS OS.
Dominating the rear panel of the TS-451D2 is the grill for the 120mm system cooling fan. To the right of the fans are the ports. First up is an HDMI 2.0 port (supporting up to 4K (4,096 x 2,160) @60Hz, under which sits two Gigabit Ethernet ports and then there are a group of three USB 3.1 Gen 2 Type-A ports.
One side panel of the NAS has a series of holes drilled in it to help with keeping the unit cool while the other side panel has a sticker with the Cloud key details to help set the NAS up.
The 3.5in drive trays are tool-free. A plastic strip fits into the side rails with a pin at either end that goes through the corresponding holes in the rail sides. The holes in the tray sides have rubber vibration-reducing grommets fitted. The rail pins then lock into the mounting holes on the drive's side – simple but effective.
If you don't trust these rails to keep the drive secure QNAP has supplied enough screws (3 per drive) to fix them in place. The trays support 2.5in drives and the only way to fix them is to use the bundled screws to go through the bottom of the tray into the drive. The bay doors have locks built into them and QNAP supply a pair of keys for them.
The mainboard of the TS-451D2 supports up to 8GB of DDR4-2400 via two SO-DIMM slots. To access these slots you first have to remove the drive trays as the slots are situated in the front left side of the drive bay space.
As is usual with a QNAP NAS there are two ways of setting up the TS-451D2, either online by entering the Cloud key which is written on a sticker 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).
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-451D2 we used the 4.4.3.1.1386 version of QNAP’s QTS OS. 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 main screen activates the Dashboard page which gives a snapshot of what’s happening with the NAS. To the left of the Dashboard shortcut are a number of other shortcuts to options and services; More (including help and desktop preferences), Options (allows changes to profile, wallpapers, the login screen and email accounts), Event Notifications, Background task monitor and Search.
Clicking on the ‘hamburger' 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 with all the various functions of the NAS neatly divided up into four sections; System, Privilege, Network & File Services and Applications. Again any of the icons can be dragged onto the main page.
As with any NAS, disk management, RAID and volume creation are at the heart of things. Setting up storage pools and volumes up are pretty straightforward thanks to the clear and precise step-by-step setup pages and wizards in the QTS Storage & Snapshots Manager.
Snapshots used to be the preserve of high-end business and enterprise systems but QNAP has brought it to this NAS as well. Using snapshots you can record the state of the system and data at any time using Storage & Snapshots Manager. It displays the status of all volumes and storage pools at a glance in a very clear, well-laid-out manner. Global settings for disks, storage and snapshots can all be adjusted from within the management window.
File Station, is a complete file management system. It supports browsing and transfer of files from the NAS to public cloud services including Dropbox, Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive and OneDrive for Business, Yandex Disk and Box, Amazon Cloud 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 filling jobs.
Qboost is an optimisation app that helps maintain the NAS at peak performance. It can free up system memory, reclaim storage space by clearing unnecessary system files and the recycle bin and help balance system load by managing schedules for most applications and services.
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.
myQNAPcloud allows for easy and safe access to a remote device. It allows multiple devices to connect to one central location to share and manage files. For even more secure connections, SSL certification is available.
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.
Network & Virtual Switch is a utility that centralises the creation, configuration, and control of network connections. It allows easy management of physical network interfaces, Thunderbolt and Wi-Fi connections as well as virtual adapters. It also makes controlling DHCP, DDNS and gateway services easier. It has both basic and advanced options, the advanced option gives you much more details about any connected networks and it also displays which port(s) are being used by highlighting them green in the graphics on the page.
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.
Notification Center is a very useful app that consolidates system logs and notifications for all the apps on the NAS into one single app. It supports flexible rule settings for easier NAS management and allows for more notification methods including email, SMS, instant message, and push notification.
HybridDesk Station is a platform that connects a NAS to an HDMI-compatible TV or monitor enabling direct access to multimedia content and other applications. By installing HD Station and then connecting a USB keyboard and mouse together with an HDMI equipped display, the TS-251B can be used as a 4K output HTPC with the bonus of not needing a PC to use it.
App Center has over 170 apps to choose from covering everything from backups to home automation and pretty much everything in between so you can tweak the TS-451D2 for your specific needs.
To test the QNAP TS-451D2 we used four 6TB Red drives (WD60EFRX, 5,400rpm class, 64MB cache), built into RAID arrays; RAID 0, 5, 6, and 10 and then tested.
Software:
ATTODisk Benchmark.
IOMeter.
Intel NASPT.
PCMark10.
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 manufacturer's 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.
QNAP quotes Sequential throughput performance for the TS-451D2 as up to 220MB/s for reads and up to 224MB/s for writes with both LAN ports being used in Link Aggregation mode. With a single Ethernet connection (the way we tested the NAS), the official figures are 113MB/s reads and 112MB/s writes which we could confirm with the ATTO benchmark, with an average figure of 116.25MB/s for both read and writes for the five tested arrays.
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 behavior 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
Trace writes a 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 written 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.
In the video tests of Intel’s NASPT benchmark, the TS-451D2-4G showed strong performance breaking the 100MB/s mark for all tests, with the exception of the HD Video Record test in a RAID 5 array where the result was 97MB/s.
In the office tests, the NAS displayed strong performance with a pretty good level of consistency across the tested arrays. Best performance came in the Office Productivity test where it averaged 55.77MB/s. When dealing with the multitude of small files that make up the Photo Album test it averaged 45.75MB/s while in the Content Creation test it averaged 10.77MB/s.
IOMeter is another open-source synthetic benchmarking tool that is able to simulate the various loads placed on the 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.
Our backup and restore tests proved no obstacle for any of the RAID arrays, averaging 99.9MB/s for backups and 97.51MB/s for restoring the data back across the four tested arrays.
The AES-NI hardware encryption engine in the Intel Celeron J4025 does a very good job of negating the effects of dealing with encrypted data. Best performance came with the drives built-in a RAID 5 array dropping just 6MB/s when writing encrypted data to the NAS and reading it back. In a RAID 6 array, the drive drops 14MB/s when writing the encrypted data but just 4MB/s when reading the data.
We tested the TS-451D2-4G with a number of scenarios that it may face in the real world. The settings for these scenarios are as follows.
File Server
512MB file size, 16KB Block size, 80% Read 20% Write 100% Random, I/O queue depth 128
Web Server
1GB file size, 16KB Block size, 100% Read 0% Write 100% Random, I/O queue depth 64
Workstation
Transfer Size: 8K Reads: 80% Writes: 20% Random: 80% Boundary: 8K Outstanding IO: 64 Threads/Workers 4
Database
2GB file size, 4KB Block size, 90% Read 10% Write, 90% Random, 10% Sequential, I/O queue depth 128
Media Streaming
160GB file size, 64K Block size, 98% Read 2% Write, 100% Sequential, Boundary: 4K, I/O depth 64, Threads/Workers: 8
Mail Server
80GB file size, 32K Block size, 58% Read 42% Write, 95% Random, Boundary: 4K, I/O depth 64, Threads/Workers: 8
Video On Demand
160GB file size, 128K Block size, 100% Read, 100% Random, Boundary: 4K, I/O depth 512, Threads/Workers: 8
Digital Video Surveillance
160GB file size, 128K Block size, 90% Read 10% Write, 100% Sequential, Boundary: 512K, I/O depth 64 Threads/Workers: 8
We also tested the NAS in a few scenarios it might be used for in an office environment. It produced average bandwidth speeds of 139.25MB/s and 114.164MB/s for the File Server and Web Server tests respectively, 34.92MB/s for the Workstation test and 118.74MB/s when tested with the Database trace.
The PCMark 10 Data Drive Benchmark has been designed to test drives that are used for storing files rather than applications. You can also use this test with NAS drives, USB sticks, memory cards, and other external storage devices.
The Data Drive Benchmark uses 3 traces, running 3 passes with each trace:
- Trace 1. Copying 339 JPEG files, 2.37 GB in total, in to the target drive (write test).
- Trace 2. Making a copy of the JPEG files (read-write test).
- Trace 3. Copying the JPEG files to another drive (read test)
Here we show the total bandwidth performance overall and for each of the individual traces.
The TS-451D2-4G displays a very consistent level of overall performance in the PCMark 10 Data Drive Benchmark across all the tested arrays.
The fastest performance from the test traces came using a RAID 10 array and the cps2 Read-Write test (64MB/s) very closely followed by the RAID 0 result of 63MB/s. Apart from these two results, all the others displayed a very high level of consistency across the tested RAID 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 an MB/s and time taken for each transfer, the data is written from and read back to a 240GB SSD.
- 100GB data file.
- 60GB iso image.
- 60GB Steam folder – 29,521 files.
- 50GB File folder – 28,523 files.
- 12GB Movie folder – (15 files – 8 @ .MKV, 4 @ .MOV, 3 @ MP4).
- 10GB Photo folder – (304 files – 171 @ .RAW, 105 @ JPG, 21 @ .CR2, 5 @ .DNG).
- 10GB Audio folder – (1,483 files – 1479 @ MP3, 4 @ .FLAC files).
- 5GB (1.5bn pixel) photo.
- BluRay Movie – 42GB.
- 21GB 8K Movie demos – (11 demos)
- 16GB 4K Raw Movie Clips – (9 MP4V files).
- 4.25GB 3D Printer File Folder – (166 files – 105 @ .STL, 38 @ .FBX, 11 @ .blend, 5 @ .lwo, 4 @ .OBJ, 3@ .3ds).
- 1.5GB AutoCAD File Folder (80 files – 60 @ .DWG and 20 @.DXF).
Click to enlarge.
The TS-451D2-4G dealt with our real-life file transfer tests without any real problems and displayed a good deal of consistency across the tested arrays.
We tested the peak power consumption of a 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 what power the device is using during each function.
The official power ratings for the TS-451D2 are 31.5W (typical) in operation and 21.3W in HDD sleep mode. The CPU that the NAS uses, an Intel Celeron J4025 has a TDP of just 10W which helps keep the numbers low. We could confirm these figures with our test results using four WD Red 6TB (WD60EFRX) drives which are rated at 5.3W (active read/write), 3.4W (idle) and 0.4W sleep.
The TS-451D2 is the latest incarnation of QNAP's popular 4-bay TS-451 NAS series.
The D2 brings a technology refresh to the product line with its Intel Celeron J4025 processor (14nm, 2.00GHz, 2.90GHz boost, 4MB cache) which brings support for up to 8MB of DDR4/LDDDR4 2400MHz memory rather than the DDR3L-1333MHz memory support of previous models.
The CPU also adds an AES-NI encryption engine to the mix. The TS-451D2 also has all USB 3.2 Gen 1 ports rather than a mix of USB 3.2 Gen 1 and USB 2.0 ports found in previous models while the HDMI port has been upgraded to 2.0 specification from the 1.4a version of previous models.
Any NAS is only as good as its operating software and QNAP’s QTS is a very good one. It’s a quick and easy to install OS thanks to the wizard that walks you through the install process. QTS has a graphically rich interface which is useful for first-time users to navigate around the software and get to grips with NAS. For more experienced users delving behind graphic interface reveals a whole host of features for the more advanced users to get to grips with. With over 170 apps in the App Center, there's plenty of software options available to tune the NAS to your specific needs.
If the current maximum 72TB of storage space (at the time of writing) supported by the TS-451D2 suddenly becomes a bit thin for your needs, fear not as it can be expanded via the USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A ports in the rear panel, as the NAS supports a number of QNAP expansion enclosures with five tower and two rackmount options. It can support up to two TR-002 (2-bay, RAID 0,1, JBOD, USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C), TR-004 (4-bay, RAID 0,1,5,10, JBOD, USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-C) or TR-004U (rackmount, 4-bay, RAID 0,1,5,10, JBOD, USB 3.2 Gen 1 (Type-C) ) units.
It also supports single examples of the TL-D800C (8-bay, JBOD, USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C), TL-R1200C-RP (rackmount, 12-bay, JBOD, USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C), UX-500P (5-bay, RAID 0, 1, 5, 6 and 10, USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-B) and the UX-800P (8-bay, RAID 0, 1, 5, 6 and 10, USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-B) so there should be a solution to cover most needs.
We found the TS-451D2-G4 for £442.12 (inc VAT) on Ballicom.co.uk HERE.
Discuss on our Facebook page HERE.
Pros
- Hardware encryption support.
- Storage expansion possibilities.
- Drive bay door locks.
Cons
- Lack of a PCIe slot.
- No bundled HDMI cable.
KitGuru says: The D2 edition brings DDR4 memory and encryption support to QNAP's popular 4-bay TS-451 series of NAS home/SOHO devices.
