One thing I will highlight is that I’m glad the system arrived with a CAT6 cable and not a CAT5e. Recently I have noticed a number of ways in which some brands have cut corners, small as they might be, in saving costs and it’s still annoying to me when a 10GbE equipped system arrives with a CAT5e cable. I’m pleased to see that the TS-h973AX is not among those devices.

Then you have KEY applications that are used on the QNAPNAS system that moves into tailored data access and use, such as: Host multiple virtual machines and containers to run a wide range of applications on the TS-h973AX. QuMagie – Facial and Thing recognition application to help you retrieve, tag and catalogue photos by its use of AI to actually ‘view’ all your years of photos and let you search by the contents of them, not the file names. Likewise, although the system features other arguably more pedestrian Ethernet ports, even these are 2.5 GbE each, meaning they are are 2.5 x the performance bandwidth available compared with traditional ethernet. These 2.5GbE ports also support trunking / link aggregation, which means that the system can combine these ports together to create a 5GbE (500MB per second) connection to be used in conjunction with the 1000MB per second port previously mentioned. Overall, that is a huge amount of performance available externally and this in conjunction with the triple-tier storage available and higher performing ZFS file system is a hugely ambitious and impressive architecture at this price point. QNAP TS-h973AX NAS Review – Internal Hardware Inside the plentiful external box, we find both the NAS and a small box of accessories. These accessories include a first-time setup guide, external PSU, mains power cable, screws and keys for the individual media bays and an ethernet cable for connecting the device to your existing router or switch. All quite standard stuff it has to be said but short of the storage media, it’s everything you’re going to need to set this system up.

QTS is the operating system for entry- and mid-level QNAP NAS. WIth Linux and ext4, QTS enables reliable storage for everyone with versatile value-added features and apps, such as snapshots, Plex media servers, and easy access of your personal cloud. System Above are a few of my software overviews that cover the general GUI and system of QuTS Hero on the TS-h886, as well as RAID rebuild and storage management overviews of the system to give you some idea of what the TVS-x88X can and cannot do:

Note: Use only QNAP memory modules to maintain system performance and stability. For NAS devices with more than one memory slot, use QNAP modules with identical specifications. The label on the front of the device clearly indicates the contents, as well as a number of the hardware and software attributes that this particularly interesting solution from QNAP promises. This is by far the most affordable ZFS solution that the company has produced so far and although it clearly has a business focus, there are a number of presentation elements here that are more familiar to prosumer desktop buyers, more accustomed to the x53D and x73 series previously released.Access-Anywhere with myQNAPcloud – Safe and secure remote access over the internet to your storage systems, apps or just file storage That large cooling fan (measuring 140mm), although almost disproportionate on a system of this scale, is exactly what this triple storage tier system needs and although the RPM can be adjusted by the user, it is recommended that it is left to adjust automatically. It is certainly the biggest single rear cooling fan I have ever seen in a desktop NAS, but understandable nevertheless. QTier – The QNP intelligent, multi-layer tiering system that works to optimize your SSD and caching configuration Enhance business productivity using the quad-core 9-bay QuTS hero NAS that supports U.2 NVMe SSD and 10GbE/2.5GbE connectivity

Cloud storage gateways realize hybrid cloud applications by working with the cache space reserved on NAS to ensure low-latency data access to the cloud. The maximum number of channels supported varies by NAS model, network configuration, and camera settings. For more information, visit https://www.qnap.com/solution/qvr-face/en-us/ Photo, Video and Music Station – Multiple file type tailored applications to access data in the best possible way that is suited to their output – along with smart searching, playlists and sharing This is not the first time that we have seen QNAP introduce this 9 storage bay chassis and in fact, this is technically the third generation of this style of device from them. Arriving in a frankly incredible compact form (measuring just 18.2 × 22.4 × 22.4cm) this system manages to house a huge amount of storage but is only fractionally larger than their traditional 4-bay NAS series. With increased measures towards cooling featured around the chassis, as well as as a remarkably clean and clear internal bay structure, you can definitely see that a lot of work has gone into the design of this casing.Multimedia Console – one portal access point to manage media access, searching, indexing and transcoding on your NAS device. The actual number of virtual machine instances may vary by the memory installed on NAS (e.g. 1 VM= 1 thread for 1 vCPU and 1GB memory). Please expend memory if needed. QuTS hero is the operating system for high-end and enterprise QNAP NAS models. With Linux and ZFS, QuTS hero supports advanced data reduction technologies for further driving down costs and increasing reliablility of SSD (all-flash) storage. System

Ventilation throughout the device is taken care of in a few small ways. The storage bays have sufficient spacing around them to allow air to pass over the storage media, internal PCB and heat sinks. There is the large rear fan we will talk about in a bit and there are ventilation holes on one side of the chassis and across a large area of the base. Warning: Using unsupported modules may degrade performance, cause errors, or prevent the operating system from starting. That is plenty of ventilation on the base of the device but there does seem to be less ventilation on either side of the main plastic chassis than I would ideally like, especially for a 9-bay storage system. I had this system running for several days during testing and comparisons and during that time, temperatures were not a problem, but still, I would have liked to have seen a little bit more ventilation on such a compact device. Overall I genuinely like the design and structure of the TS-h973AX hardware so far, although there is the odd placement of things that I take slight issue with. Chinese (Traditional & Simplified), Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil), Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, and TurkishAn AI-powered photo management app, supporting automated photo categorization with AI Albums, iOS® Live Photo display, and powerful search tool for ultimate photo management and sharing solution. There is an additional 2x SATA SSD bays that, once again, are plastic and screwless in their design. drives in all of these bays are held in place by plastic clips that line-up directly with the screw holes inside each bay. This is by no means mandatory and the TS-h973AX arrives with more than enough screws for 2.5/3.5″ media to be more rigidly installed if you prefer. The SATA SSD installed in these bays are generally regarded for use as additional cache towards the hard drive storage array, allowing their high performance and IOPS benefits to be passed on to the larger, more affordable, but slower hard drive RAID array.