QNAP TVS-h874-i7-32G-US 8 Bay High-Speed Desktop NAS with M.2 PCIe Slots, 12th Gen Intel Core CPU, up to 64GB DDR4 RAM, 2.5 GbE Networking and PCIe Gen 4 expandability (Diskless)

I was a Synology NAS user for the last 15 years and was looking to upgrade my 15 year old 12 bay Synology NAS.I love the powerful Synology OS and how reliable it is, unfortunately my 15 year old NAS cannot receive any new updates and is restricted to max 6tb hard drives. The processor of my Synology NAS was also under, but it was more than enough to handle NAS tasks.I was looking at the higher up models of Synology for more powerful processors for hardware encoding and running VMs. To my disappointment, those models only support Synology labeled hard drives which are 3 times more expensive while being slower.So, I looked at QNAP, even though there was some bad press about hacking and ransomware attacks on their NASes. These concerns very quickly dispelled after I started using theses NASes.The TVS-h874X comes with an i9 Intel processor and 64GB ram. It also has 2 * 10G Ethernet included, with the latest USB A and C ports. There’s also an available PCIe gen 4 slot for either adding a powerful graphics card or expansion card. This is incredibly powerful capabilities for a NAS.I have added a 16 bay expansion to this NAS by buying a QNAP expansion bay directly from QNAP. I populated the 8 bays on my NAs as well as 12 * 3.5” bays on the expansion with Seagate exos 20tb hard drives. I also added 4*2tb 2.5” SSDs on the enclosure, giving an incredibly powerful and vast storage.The TVS-h874X also has 2*M.2 NVMe slots, which I populated with 2*2tb M.2 NVMe drives. I set this up as raid1 and used it to install the QuTS hero operating system for maximum speed.The QuTS hero operating system supports the robust self correcting ZFS file system, making it an incredibly powerful and reliable NAS. QNAP also lets you access my NAS anywhere in the world without opening my home network via ddns. This is really secure and makes it incredibly useful.I also have subscribed to their “myQNAP cloud” to store some of the NAS files of site with the QNAP hybrid backup.For security it has two factor authentication, built in firewall, antivirus apps etc. All of these are pretty powerful and similar to the firewall on Pfsense. I can restrict by domain. Countries etc. Great. I feel that my QNAP NASes have Pfsense level security which is very secure.It helps to be pretty experienced with Pfsense, but their instructions and videos on YouTube make it easy for everyone to use.They also have container station and a VM station for virtual machines. The i9 Intel cpu can easily handle this.This is far beyond what I was hoping for in Synology. I am now a QNAP convert. I bought 2 of these usines for replication and data spill over.Highly recommended! I am a convert.

This product is awesome. Easy to set up and use with many applications included.

Just works. Popped in spinning rust and some m.2 SSDs and an nVidia graphics card and it's now hosting a lot of services and it just works. The interface is mostly okay, no real problems. Storage, transcoding, container hosting, all works great.

I bought the i5 version and have almost maxed this system out... 8x16TB exos drives, 2x890 Pro nvme drives, nvidia t400 gpu, Asus 10G card, 64GB of RAM... I plan to use this machine to the max in my home. Eventually, probably after the warranty runs out, I would like to upgrade the processor.I run 10 or so docker containers, Plex, VM's, etc...I'm new to qnap, so take this for what it is: QUTS is decent, but I've come across weird bugs. Creating one of the pools on one of the SSD's had the process freeze for hours until I rebooted. The other had gone fine right before. There's just been weird little things like that. Not often, but they're there.That said, it's been quite a beast. It's all setup with a lot of what I want for the moment. It's super-quick, it's got a lot of features. I could imagine some amount of options being overwhelming for even some technical users. Sometimes I just want to turn on a feature and it work. That's not a thing a lot of the time. It's not hard, it's just lot of hassle. Then there's the first question you'll have to decide. QTS or QuTS. There are implications for each choice. I chose QuTS, but who knows if I chose right? It clears your data, and I don't have time to be transferring that much data just to try out the other OS.That question about which OS you choose has major implications for the licenses you may or may not need to purchase. The example I'm aware of is cameras. If you choose the older QTS, you're given 8 cameras to hook up without paying... You want more? You can do it by paying once. On QuTS, you get 2 free cameras, which is next to useless. Then you go to add more, and you find out you're not buying perpetual licenses. You're subscribing. You pay per month, per camera to add them. That's crazy for a home user. My plan is to use BlueIris in Windows. But there's also docker containers for Zoneminder as alternatives to qnaps offering. Before you subscribe to qnap, take a look at your other options.To sum it up, it's not perfect. It's not close. But it's probably one of the best NAS you're going to find in 2023. I came from ReadyNAS, so that's basically ancient now. There are things I liked about that system. But there's a lot more I like here. I've just gotta learn the qnap way of doing things and refining how I do things.