I purchased the 453D at a time when QuTS was getting a lot of attention. I understood that it would be compatible eventually and hoped to set up a system which would store files (photos and videos) that would be protected from bit rot and data corruption. I looked into setting up Qumagie to be able to search the pile of images more easily but never got around to finishing the project. I’ve got four 8GB drives in there and am ready to roll forward.
Unfortunately I am hearing that QuTS or ZFS is only compatible with the 453E? That would be a huge OMG to miss out on being able to use it officially as that would be a very odd minor change with huge impact and might consider abandoning this. Hopefully someone can provide a solution since the unit still has great ratings and, for the short time used, it was reasonably speedy for what it is supposed to do as well. Thank you.
I’m not sure why people are so concerned about “bit-rot.” If you have appropriate backups, then you will be fine.
The TS-453D has a very low end Celeron J4125. That is way down there in performance. It can only have 8 GB of memory.
The minimum memory needed for QuTS Hero is 8 GB. Trying to use Hero on this NAS would be a pretty poor experience as really the only Hero thing you could use would be WORM.
The TS-453E also has the same processor but it can be upgraded to 16GB. Hero loves memory. And since things like inline compression and deduplication need a minimum of 16 GB, that’s probably why the 453E supports Hero and the 453D does not.
Either way, you won’t get good performance with that CPU.
Sorry…
If you are concerned about your data, then you need a proper backup strategy.
Multiple copies, backed up to multiple places. Both locally and in the cloud.
8GB RAM and NVME are installed to the max possible. I have backups and the idea was to have a working hub where I can monitor bit rot and/or file degradation for replacement. But what I’m hearing is that the QNAP 453D is essentially ready for the dumpster. I won’t bother resetting it up and will just pull out the components.
I’m sorry but what do you mean by bit rot. I have never experienced this and I have files that are 20 years old or older.
I hear people talk about this and what I can tell you is if you have multiple copies of a file, you won’t have bit rot.
I have not seen file degradation either. I’ve seen hard drives fail. Back-ups cure that.
I don’t know what you are expecting Hero to do for you. There’s no “bit rot” functions other than WORM which is really to prevent changes to files.
And I’ve seen issues with ZFS where you get errors in the file system and have to re-do your entire NAS. It happened to me. I had to wipe my NAS and restore from backup because of random file system errors introduced by ZFS. So I am not sure what you are expecting.
Your TS-453D is perfectly fine for a low end NAS. No need to dumpster it.
I’ve had photos suddenly fail to load properly (partial file corruption) including video. A sector can also go bad on an HDD even though it should be nowhere near retirement. Remapping doesn’t solve the problem. Having a system that can detect and check when files have changed is highly useful and then backup copies from other sources can be used to replace the files. Unfortunately, I’ve got plenty many lower end NAS boxes that are only capable of much the same limited tasks.
I don’t think there’s the functionality you are looking for in Hero. I’m not aware of something that watches for files to change and then alerts you. That would be a massive amount of system resources.
I’m not trying to argue with you, but what feature of Hero gives you what you are looking for? I’d love to know and understand, but I’m not aware of it offering what you are asking…
OK. You are talking about the self-healing feature.
Yes, so it doesn’t scan or keep track of bad data. What happens is when data is read, if the checksum for that block doesn’t compute correctly, then it rebuilds that block from the parity or mirrored data in the raid.
So yes, that is a nice feature. I had forgotten about that as it is in the file system and there’s no settings for it.
Well, what I would recommend for you to do if you want to utilize hero is keep that NAS you have and use it as a backup platform. Buy a new NAS that supports Hero (buy the most expensive NAS you can afford - FYI - and only you knows what that dollar amount is). Backup critical data from the Hero NAS to the 453D.
I spent about $470 on it hearing about the upcoming QuTS Hero release, which was announced before the 453D was from my recollection. What is beyond irritating was now to find out that the 453 series had the “D” is excluded and only “E” got it. They should have just created a whole new product line so as not to be confusing.
At the time I was considering it over another that featured BTRFS, which is from a competitor and whose tactics I was not fond. But, in total irony, I purchased this for that purpose and it’s not usable. I’ve got other older devices that work fine for backup, which only go on when more files are added.
Well, I’m sorry you feel you wasted your money. Did QNAP ever say or advertise that this model was going to support Hero? If they did, then you could have a case.
The 453E version is capable of up to 16 GB memory which is really needed with Hero. I think 8 GB would be painful.
But you know you could always try to install Hero on your unit. It uses the same CPU as the E version. I think the main difference is the memory. Just a thought.
The TS-453D was released in May of 2020 and the 453E in Sept 2022. It’s not entirely surprising that Hero won’t run on a 5 year old low-end NAS. Hero was first released in November 2020 and was only for high end rack mount models initially. QTS Hero 6 was announced in November 2025.
QuTS Hero was announced in 2020, I believe. I bought the 452D in 2022, which had excellent reviews, but the distinction wasn’t clear as to compatibility. I used to be on the phpbb QNAP forums back in the day and I may have heard rumors or there, I cannot remember. It just is disappointing.
@Franklin provides an alternative or I just may end up using it the same way I have many others, without the weight of RAID and greater potential to lose data. This wouldn’t be mission critical to revive quickly, as you mention about backup v. redundancy. I’ll have to think about how to tackle this, especially since AI has created a huge cost spike on virtually all PC components at the moment.
Often companies don’t make official releases about specific models because they aren’t sure or haven’t prioritized at the time of announcements which models they will support. I don’t know where I heard about the 453 series compatibility, but it is a distinction that can be easily lost. Unfortunately this is not an uncommon issue in the industry. Some companies are notoriously terrible about their naming conventions and laptop and desktop models can be painfully difficult to distinguish.
Again, I’m sorry you feel you were misled. If you wish to have a certain feature, I would not recommend buying something in the hope that said feature will be available in the future. Instead, if you want/need something, make the investment in the hardware known to support it otherwise, you are setting yourself up for disappointment and frustration like you are experiencing.
AS @dolbyman stated, QTS now has scrubbing available for fighting bit rot. Set up scrubbing on your RAID and do it on a regular schedule.
I may still decide to use it as a photo and video recognition and replacement for Google Photos, which won’t cover our entire library. I’m seeing that it probably needs to be reset up different as it has four 8TB drives in there with one set up as a system drive (with one 8TB drive) and 3 others as part of a JBOD storage pool, which doesn’t seem ideal.
Is there any setup guide or recommended setup for QuMagie? I recall they had some recommendations for setting up directories. (Our photos are currently folders as year followed by description of activity.) Other recommendations were trying to also separate by month.)
Well, first with 4 drives, I would set it up as a RAID 5. System drive is NOT OS drive. The OS is spread across all drives. System drive is basically the default place for apps, place where QNAP stores some of its internal databases, etc. Again, it is not the OS.
I believe QMagie arranges things on its own to an extent. I have it installed but haven’t looked at it in a while. It is a decent app. You can make albums, etc, but I believe it arranges things by date by default. Maybe some others can assist further…
I thought that with 2 NVMEs in there it would actually store the OS separately but apparently this is not the case. From research it seems that the NVMEs may also be of very limited performance benefit (limited in use), which I found surprising. That seems to be the way to go and set up snapshots, although it will likely need minimal storage space since this will be setup to store, not modify.
The documentation is challenging for QuMagie as are tutorials. There used to be some setup but now all Google searches go nowhere because of a reorganization of the QNap website and they didn’t redirect anything. It might all sit on YouTube so I’ll have to go there but searching here was also sadly not very resourceful.
The NVMEs are much faster and apps stored there will launch faster, Virtual Machines running from there will be faster, etc. But the OS is not “benefited” from them.
QNAP should have documentation and information on QuMagie. Look there not Google.
