QNAP Turbo vNAS TVS-463 SMB NAS Appliance Review

Introduction

As NAS platforms have evolved over the years, especially from top tier brands like QNAP, Thecus and Asustor, we have seen a shift from storage only devices, to home media centers. Now appliances from QNAP are beginning yet a second trend towards a NAS/PC hybrid solution.

The TVS series from QNAP is the first of a new generation in NAS appliances. While the last few years have brought us away from the Marvell powered solutions into Intel Atom and now Bay Trail, the TVS takes thing even further and introduces us to AMD as a NAS platform. The TVS-463 in the lab today is the four bay solution fitting this bill.

The new TVS series aesthetically sets itself apart with QNAP's new gold color scheme. With that said, these new appliances do keep the metal substructure we have come to know, along with the front mounted LCD screen. With this new solution being an SMB model, each of the front drive trays are lockable. As we spoke of briefly above, the TVS series is the first AMD platform NAS solution to come to market. With that we have a 2.4GHz quad-core processor at the heart featuring a Radeon graphics engine. The 463 is available with either 4GB or 8GB of DDR3 and is expandable up to 16GB.

For anyone that has used a QNAP NAS appliance in the past, you know that QTS is the operating system onboard these appliances, the version used during testing today is 4.1.3. If you are one that is interested in purchasing a NAS appliance from QNAP you can view a live demo of their OS here.

Above, we have the full system specification pulled from the QNAP website for the TVS-463. As you can see, the quad-core AMD processor sits at a base frequency of 2.4GHz and sits next to either 4GB or 8GB of DDR3 memory. The TVS-463 supports both 2.5" and 3.5" hard drives with additional support for some solid-state drives and caching. The QTS operating system is held by a 512MB SATA DOM, while connectivity options extend to dual gigabit Ethernet, five USB 3.0 ports and dual HDMI with 4K support. This system is also 10GBe ready via the PCIe 2.0 x4 slot.