QNAP TS-453B (8GB) 4-Bay NAS Review

QNAP's TS- x53B series has a new distinctive design finished in black with a metallic blue-gray front bezel strip housing the power button, indicator LEDs and the front ports.

The drive bays are protected by a high gloss Piano Back panel which slides on an off and has a slide lock to hold it in place. There are no locks on the drive trays themselves.

On the front panel above the drive cage is a very small OLED display that displays information on the network, system, disks and volumes and by using the two (enter and select ) buttons it also enables changes to be made to network settings. Under this screen sit four tiny drive activity LEDs.

Under the power button sit four indicator LEDs. Reading from to bottom these are Status, LAN activity, USB and SD Card activity. The SD Card slot sits directly under the indicators and under this sits the USB QuickConnect port and a USB 3.0 port for the One Touch Copy button that sits under it. The USB QuickConnect port is Type C but annoyingly QNAP don't bundle a cable with the NAS so you have to buy it elsewhere.

The drive trays are made of plastic and have grab handles moulded into them. The trays are held in place with small latches.  Supporting both 3.5in and 2.5in drives, the larger drives are held in place by plastic strips that fit into grooves in the drive trays sides with pins that fit through the tray side and into the drives side mounting holes.

These mounting holes in the tray sides have anti-vibration grommets fitted. If you want to make sure the drives are installed firmly, you can use the screws provided to fix the drive via holes in the tray base. 2.5in drives can only be fixed via these holes in the tray base.

The PCIe slot sits at the top rear edge of the motherboard and can be accessed with the cover removed. The slot can be used to house a 10GbE network, WiFi or USB 3.1 cards. QNAP's QM2 card, a card that features dual M.2 slots and 10GbE connectivity supporting SSD caching and QNAP's Qtier auto-tiering technology for improved NAS performance is another option for the slot.

To access the two SO-DIMM slots, all hard drives need to be removed as well as the cover.  Access to these slots is via an open panel in the drive cage, it's a little fiddly to access but doesn't present any major problems.

Physical Specifications
Processor: Intel Celeron J3455 quad-core 1.5 GHz (2.3 GHz burst frequency).
Memory: 8GB.
Gigabit Ethernet Ports: 2.
Rear panel connectors:  4 x USB 3.0, 3 x audio, 2 x HDMI 1.4b.
Front panel connectors: 1 x USB-C QuickAccess, 1 x USB 3.0
RAID support: 0,1, 5, 6, 10.
Cooling:  1x 120mm.
Maximum hard drive size supported: 10TB.
Maximum Capacity: 40TB.
Dimensions (D x W x H):  226 x 170 x 168mm.
Weight: 2.33kg.

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