Am I FINALLY Ditching My Synology? - QNAP TS-462

I've had this sonological Nas for years, but today could be his last day. This is the TS 462 from qap and in this video I'll talk about the time I spent with it and answer some questions like, how much hardware does it have? Get Your Money How does the software compare to something like sonology? Is he really good enough to

finally

replace my old friend? Let's find out that this sonology ds215 plus was the first Nas I bought and it is almost 10 years old, now I have others. network attached storage for Youtube footage and that sort of thing, but I still use it for more family stuff like our Plex library and photos and I also use it as an NVR to manage my security cameras despite it being a bit slow these days the sonological monitoring station The software is excellent and I personally have not found anything that I think is worth replacing it with; however, Q's qvr suite looks quite attractive and I'm wondering if this could

finally

be the solution I've been looking for now to be completely transparent qap sent me this Naas to look at, but as always when a brand sends a product, They have absolutely nothing to say about what I say and they cannot watch this video until you do now yes Don't trust me yet, that's totally fair, but I still hope I can provide valuable information.

I have been using this Naas for about a month and feel like I have a good understanding of how it works and on this. video I'm going to talk about the good, the bad, and, frankly, the annoying. Now, one thing that will be really annoying is trying to stay well-groomed without using today's sponsor's 5.0 Ultra performance package. This latest package includes the new 5.0 lawnmower. Ultra has an improved trimmer blade with longer, wider rounded teeth that are harsh on hair but gentle on skin. It can be used with one of three guards of your choice, but the Tremor Blade is right where it all starts.

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These are preconfigured in a raid 5 configuration and this is how qaps sent me the nas on the front you can find the status of the power button. LED one 10GB per second USB port and OneTouch USB copy button on the back, there is another 10GB per second USB port as well as two more USB 2.0 ports, there is also an HDMI port, a power connector DC and a 2 1/2 GB per second USB port. second ethernet port, which is always a welcome site internally, there is a PCI gen 3x two slot which is mainly intended for their 10 gig network card, which they also sent me to test, it's just a pcie slot, although so I could realistically put just about anything here, but don't necessarily expect driver support, at least not within the qaps OS.

The interior also includes two m.2 SSD slots and two sodm sockets, making upgrading the RAM quite easy. The system comes with 2 gigs of RAM. but there is also a 4 GB option. However, I would recommend purchasing the cheapest option and then upgrading it yourself. Qap claims this is not supported, but I didn't have any problems and I don't think you have the CPU either. this guy is the Intel n4505, a dual core Jasper CPU released in 2021 for most Naas tasks, this CPU will be enough, but don't expect to run a bunch of virtual machines or do anything else that requires quite a bit of CPU in general, the hardware is pretty solid, you get four hot swappable drive bays, two nvme slots, decent networking, upgradable ram, but the hardware isn't really the most important thing here because as with any nas on the market it will live or die depending on the quality of the software.

I mean, ask anyone who has used a teras. I used the qaps qfinder software to locate the nas once it booted up and setup was pretty easy. Most of the information and descriptions were pretty clear, but some things just weren't as straightforward as it would make it. I was hoping to have a product like this, don't get me wrong, it wasn't bad, things were polished, it just seemed like a few points were missed, every now and then there were little quirks in the user interface, like tool tips that They always repeated the same text and appeared. the way I or when I got this message to set up raid clearing schedules, but when I clicked the Go to do that button, it took me to a window that didn't mention raid clearing anywhere unless I finally looked in a settings icon at the top.

True, I wouldn't have been able to find it, so it was a bit peculiar. I ended up creating a thin volume that I called media along with the existing volume called Data. I finally set up all the basic Nas features and had an SMB share up and running. I made sure to also set up the 10 gig connection to really put things to the test. Performance was about right about what you would expect from the raid 5 setup, i.e. barely faster than what you could get with a 2. and 1/2 gig connection, but remember those two nvme slots, they can be used to add some caching now.

I'm honestly not very familiar with SSD caches outside of non-Raid use, so I was very interested to see how this would help performance. I bought two rig group 1 TB SSDs pretty cheap and opened this Naas and I have to give qap some credit here. All it takes to get into this unit is to remove three screws and slide the side cover from there, it's really easy to open. On the m.2 SSDs add a 10gig card or upgrade the memory, the m.2 slots are also tool-free which is a really nice touch while I had it open. I also upgraded the Ram with two 8GB ddr4 modules sewn together for one with a total of 16GB with everything back together, I was able to easily configure the two SSDs as a mirrored read/write cache and this immediately allowed our IG Nick to flex his muscles .

Now obviously SSDs are not cheap and would increase the overall cost. system, but having this upgrade path if you need more performance is pretty nice. I love that it's true now and raid-free, but setting up a cache like this isn't necessarily as easy or even possible now that a Nas isn't really a Nas. without good backups and I think this is something that the Q app does quite well as well. Determining which app to use wasn't extremely easy, but once I figured out how to use hybrid backup sync, I was able to set up a variety of backup schedules for different destinations, such as local machines, FTP servers, cloud providers like AWS or back blaz and even qaps' own cloud storage, which is relatively new.

I decided to set up backups with AWS as well as the qaps cloud service, and both worked without any issues overall on my part. The experience using this just as a Nas, for the most part everything was pretty smooth, Aside from some UI quirks, all the features you'd expect from network-attached storage, like shared backups, that sort of thing worked very, very well, however, when you start moving. Other than that, things get a little more difficult. First of all, one complaint I have is that the OS in general is slow. This could be partly due to the dual-core CPU, but I suppose it's also the fault of the operating system.

When installed on hard drives, which seems to be the way most of these Naas devices are set up, the experience wasn't all that different from using my old sonology and overall working on this wasn't as enjoyable as I think it should be. have been. I imagine there's a reason they install the OS, but I almost wish they'd just install the OS on a small internal SSD and then backup that to their hard drive pool just to try and speed things up . a bit, there were some really cool features I found, like the ability for this to not only recognize my UPS via USB but also function as a master to help gracefully shut down other systems in the event of a power outage.

I liked this cool representation of the drive states which made it extremely clear which drive was and the built in application manager is a bit limited as many of the options are QA for developing software with names that sometimes They are not necessarily the clearest for The qvpn example is pretty clear, but with other things like Q Center or Q boost I had to Google what they were, there were also third party apps including Plex, but my experience was not the best when I first set it up. I installed it on data volume 1, not the media volume I configured to store my files and such.

When I tried to set up a library in Plex, I could see my media volume, but not the folder I set up inside with my movies and shows I tried. I migrated the Plex installation to my medium volume, but after doing so I couldn't find anything. I imagine if I looked up a guide on how to set up Plex in qap I could have gotten this to work just fine, but that's beside the point. In my opinion, if someone buys a device like this, setting up something like Plex should be really easy and straightforward. I didn't get into virtualization because, frankly, I don't think this system is suited for that, but there is an application. in the app center for setting up containers, I thought this is a little more out of my wheelhouse and might be a good way to represent how this could work more like a home server instead of just a Nas.

The experience here was once again polished along with certain aspects being really clear as long as you had a decent understanding of how Docker works and being able to simply paste the yl from the Docker Compos files was pretty impressive but some things just weren't clear upon start a container, there wasn't much feedback about what was going on and it took me a while to realize that the error messages were in an icon at the top and not around the other information where I expected there to be logs, there were a few others Annoying stuff when configuring containers too, for example in this Optional Host Port field.

I assumed that if I left it blank it would just map the container port to the host port, instead it would just map it a random port and not actually tell you what it was. which caused a lot of frustration. I also ran into other problems when trying to set up containers using applications that are basically Docker Compose. For some reason when I set up containers this way I was never able to get the link mounts to work and it is quite possible that this was just my mistake was not setting things up correctly, however I was able to get the link mounts to work fine by configure the containers individually.

I was able to set up the home assistant without any problems and even cleverly set it up for a Minecraft server but with the dual-core Celeron. I wouldn't recommend setting up Jelly Fin and unlike the Plex app I was able to get this one working, I just know that hardware acceleration might be out as the Jasper CPU on this needs a few different drivers which I don't think. They are included in the QAP software and this brings me to another annoyance, which is that there is no way to simply gain access to a terminal within the software.

Now I understand your reasoning here that you probably don't want clients to accidentally break something, but just make it a hidden option in the advanced settings that experienced users canactivate because I often found myself wanting to do simple things like trying to figure out what a group id was or checking my IP addresses or just trying to install some drivers. to see if I could get hardware accelerated transcoding working and I couldn't because I didn't have access to the command line now. I'll be honest, I don't really care that this didn't handle running apps and Docker containers very well because my main concerns for a device like this are how well it will work as a Nas but also how well it can work as an NVR because I really hope this I can replace my sonology now. that I needed to install the qaps qvr software but which qvr pro elite Center guard what does that mean when setting up my sonology?

I just installed the monitoring station and it finally worked. I found out that qvr Pro is the free version that you can also upgrade. That includes eight camera channels by default, which, to be fair, is a much better deal than the measly 2 provided by Sonology, but setup was still a bit of a pain. First of all, I couldn't even install it because it only had 2GB of RAM and it needs at least four and it didn't even tell me this until I downloaded the app and started trying to set it up, which was a little frustrating.

Fortunately, I had already planned to upgrade the RAM, so I did it and was finally able to start the installation. I had to install qvr Pro to configure my cameras, but also install qvr Center to manage my qvr Pro server and then play any of my cameras. I needed to install the qvr client software on my PC and then log in using the credentials created within the center qvr. Now compare it once again to sonology where I just installed the surveillance station and that allowed me to set up my cameras, create schedules and monitor everything live. from within a browser tab, the fact that you can't use the browser simply to view your cameras is a huge bummer and I hope you don't run Linux because there is currently no client software available unless you run Windows or Mac OS outside The sheer complexity of it all qvr worked quite well and was very easy to work with both on my phone and in the Windows app.

Again, there were a few things in the user experience that bothered me, like not having a 5 second or so button. Windows app while having it in the phone app or the fact that the Zoom timeline was a bit buggy at times, there also doesn't seem to be a way to adjust notifications from the mobile app which is quite a pain Great, however, as I said once everything was set up, playback was much smoother and snappier than my previous sonology overall. I had a pretty good time reviewing qap for the first time, but I think they still have some obstacles, especially when it comes to their software, but do you even need to use their software?

I mean, after all, this is basically a small Intel-based PC, so could you install something like trace? Well, this is Haven hardware, so let's find out. I took out all the units and just put them in. on a single nvme as a boot drive as well as a flash drive with the true installation image now after spamming a variety of f keys and delete I finally came across a bio screen and changed my boot order so I could boot the installer after installing and configuring trunow it ran smoothly and within minutes I was up and running.

I reinserted the drives and set up a cluster with two mirrored vevs to try to get a little better read performance. I also set up the T gig interface without any problems and yes, I now had a real server up and running, the fan and status lights were working normally and the performance was pretty good for four spinning disks. Now you may have some compatibility issues when trying to use others. software but I had no problem running trace and I even added a different 10gig Nick just to make sure the PCI slot actually worked and yes it did.

Will this qap finally replace my old sonology? Probably not, but that's not necessarily because it's a bad product for me, it probably makes sense to buy a newer version of an analysis based 2, since I love trying new things and with things I have a family that is used to using sonology apps and it's just really going to be easier to stick with that ecosystem and not have to learn something new and do all the necessary setup with qvr. There are still some quirks that I know my wife might annoy and yes, it's not worth it personally.

For me, it doesn't replace my sonology for security cameras, but is it a decent Nas product? In my opinion, it fits into a strange middle ground. It does a very good job with the basic Nas stuff, but the software and ecosystem just aren't it. Pretty good as something like sonology and it's a little more expensive and blocky than what you could do with some DIY. Now the software may not be as bad as I think and to be fair I wasn't testing. This constantly for a month I was in and out and forgetting some things but to be fair I think that's what the user experience is like for most people who own a Naz like this and I just realize that I'm not so frustrated when every once in a while I have to check in and change something in my Nas sonology.

Now obviously I have to mention security issues as qap has been in the news for quite a few security vulnerabilities. If security is a big concern for you, you would probably just do it. stick with sonology as they have a slightly better reputation but overall my advice would be to just don't expose your Nas to the internet at all and if you need to access it from outside your local network use a VPN, that doesn't work . to completely resolve any security issues that may exist but it will be much more secure and you won't have to worry about as many vulnerabilities that may exist and while it's great that you can install something like trace on this I wouldn't recommend purchasing it for that reason Express a Unless you really like how pretty it looks if you want something small and compact with four drive bays.

In fact I would recommend looking at something like one of the Pams products, they have a 4 bay Naas very similar to this but with a quad core and dual NYX 2 and 2GB CPU which is a bit cheaper at least at the moment from filming, so if what you're looking for is a really simple solid Nas, you don't have to do a lot of tinkering. but you don't want to spend money on something like sonology, the qap could be a good option, at least that's what I think. If you have experience with this Naas or others like it, I would love to hear your opinions. in the comments below, that's it for this one, so as always, thank you all so much for watching, stay curious and I can't wait to see you on the next one, at least not within the

qnap

OS.

I'm very bad at winking.