
The single-bay TS-130 can be found for just These have very similar specifications other than the TS-130 has just a single bay, where the TS-230 is the dual drive variant that gets 2GB of RAM over the 1GB in its little brother. QNAP makes two very similar designs, the TS-130 and TS-230 reviewed here. QNAP website, where all the supported applications are listed, along with the hardware they run on. If you have a specific requirement, it might be worth heading to the Overall, more apps would enhance the QNAP offering, but most users should find sufficiently varied tools for their needs. That’s not a limitation on other versions of Video Station I’ve seen elsewhere and a good reason for using Plex on the TS-230.

I’d recommend Plex, as the alternative QNAP branded Video Station application won’t decode many of the common encoding formats, like H.265, without the purchasing of an additional CAYIN MediaSign license. This enhanced OS has gone through Beta and is currently at the Release Candidate stage of development and should deliver enhanced security, performance improvements, along with a host of other benefits. The QNAP own-brand OS on this NAS is called QTS, and shortly a 5.0 release will arrive with a new Linux Kernel 5.10. The bottleneck is the gigabit Ethernet port, and SSDs won’t resolve those limitations. What the SSD cache does help with are those situations where there are many small files, multiple users accessing different resources and the indexing of multimedia. In testing, I saw from a single SATA hard drive speeds around 113MB/s, the effective high watermark for Gigabit Ethernet.

It’s recommended that only SSDs designed for NAS use are installed and for network-connected users, it won’t make the read and write speeds any quicker.

The very best performance option is a single 3.5in drive mounted alongsideĪn SSD, with the solid-state storage being used to cache conventional drives operations.
