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QNAP TurboNAS TS-251 Review – Souped up Storage

One of the top concerns of anyone who relies on technology is the ever increasing need for more and more storage.

As the needs of the average computer user have become more sophisticated, just grabbing a new hard drive and stuffing it into your desktop machine is no longer as good a solution as it was just a few years back.

No, these days what you want is a NAS – a “network attached storage” – box that hard drives slot in to which connects to your network and expands your storage capacity.

This incidentally, is just a basic definition of a NAS  – the newer devices  offer so much more than that.

One such newer NAS

QNAP’s TurboNAS TS-251 is one such newer NAS. It can accommodate two hard drives for a maximum capacity of 12TB, it connects to your network via its Gigabit Ethernet ports, and not only does it store your files and make them available to you anywhere, but it has a selection of its own dedicated apps that enable it to do so much more.

That it runs apps is actually one of the best features of this particular NAS, as they really open up the possibilities.

App Center
That’s a lotta apps.

For instance, it’s thanks to apps that the TS-251 can be set up as a Plex server; Plex is a well-known multimedia management program that helps people arrange their movies, TV shows and music and play them on any device that Plex runs on. Should you fork out the cash to activate Plex’s more advanced streaming features for around R58, you’ll also be able to stream any of the content stored on the NAS via the internet.

Just the tip

That’s just the tip of the iceberg.  The TS-251 has apps for BitTorrent, backing up the contents of your Gmail account, converting images to PDFs and much more.

The most surprising one I saw in my time with the drive was “Virtualisation Station”, an app that lets the NAS create, manage and run virtual machines. On QNAP’s bigger NAS devices, this effectively turns them into network appliances and gives small businesses ways to deploy VMs without subscribing to other companies’ Cloud services. On this particular NAS, however, it’s not as useful as it only has 1GB of RAM, and virtual machines are notoriously RAM-hungry. Still, that it’s even there is a point in QNAP’s favour.

RAIDers of the not-lost data

And then there’s the fact that it has two bays; this means it can also do RAID, a technical capability that can provide data protection or fast read and write speeds, depending on how it’s set up.

I was particularly impressed with how easy it was to set this drive up. All of the instructions are in the box, and if you can read, you can do it – no IT experience needed. Plug it in, turn it on, download some software to initialise the drive, fire up a website, sign up for a QNAP account and follow the directions you’re given, and that’s it.

Once it’s set up, you can do everything you need to from a web interface, from installing apps to setting the drive up as your own personal cloud device. I was a bit disappointed that QNAP’s software couldn’t actually play back the movies I’d copied to the drive via the myQNAPcloud website, but I solved that problem with Plex so I can’t really complain too loudly.

Copy speeds are really good, too – over a wired connection I saw a sustained transfer rate of over 100MB/s; over WiFi that dropped to 10MB/s, but that has more to do with my router setup than the TS-251. Rest assured, this NAS is capable of good data transfer speeds.

And when it comes to build quality, QNAP went with a sturdy white plastic, although the tray the hard drive actually mounts to feels quite weak. In all, a middling effort – not awful, but not high quality either. So long as the NAS doesn’t move much (or at all), it should last you years.

QNAP TurboNAS TS-251_alternate
Sure it’s plastic, but it’s sturdy plastic.

So yes, the TS-251 can do pretty much anything you could reasonably expect a NAS to do, and a bit more. Just keep in mind that you’ll need to buy two hard drives in addition to the R5 339 you’ll shell out for it, which could mean a professional cloud solution may be more cost-effective.

A word

And lastly, a word on the “personal cloud over which you have total control” vs. the “professional, paid-for cloud storage solution from a company you might not trust entirely” issue: Owning a “personal cloud” solves the trust issue, but it’s relatively expensive and has considerably more IT overhead than DropBox/Google Drive/OneDrive etc.

Yes it’s great, and yes there’s tons of other things a device that offers you a personal cloud can do, but ultimately if it’s just more storage you want and to access your files anywhere, a professional cloud storage option is probably better in the long run.

If, on the other hand, you really want a versatile, feature-rich network-attached storage device for your movies and TV shows, and you’d like a Plex server for your Smart TV/phone/tablet, the TS-251 can do all of that and more, really, really well, so definitely get one.

The QNAP TurboNAS TS-251 is available without hard drives from Takealot for R5 339.

[su_box title=”Details” box_color=”#f37021″]

  • 2-Bay NAS
  • Supports SATA3 6.0Gbps drives
  • 2.41GHz Dual-Core CPU
  • 1GB DDR3 RAM (8GB Max)
  • 2 x Gigabit Ethernet ports
  • 2 x USB 2.0
  • 2 x USB 3.0
  • Virtual Machine Support
  • Hotswappable Drive Bays
  • 12.0TB Max

[/su_box]

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