As a power home user, I’m looking for a NAS which meets the following specifications to serve as the nexus for my family’s private network:
4 or 5 SATA bays.
At least two 16 Gbps M.2 slots (32 Gbps would be better), plus an expansion slot for at least two more.
2nd expansion slot for networking upgrades (SFP+ now, SFP28 in the future, etc.)
Configurable TDP down to 15W or lower. It must be efficient.
Side-band ECC support (ZFS)!
Support for at least 32GB ECC memory, preferably 64GB.
At least 4/8 cores/threads. 6/12 would be even better (for ZFS / VMs).
Quiet cooling - i.e. a large fan rather than several small noisy leaf blowers (this also makes it far easier to find compatible quiet replacement parts).
At least one >=40Gbps USB4 port with PCIe tunneling (for rapid transfer to an external NVMe SSD or future network adapters). DMA protection preferred, but not essential.
Wake-on-LAN for at least one network port.
Preferably no more than £1,000 … if feasible.
I appreciate that many home customers also seek transcoding capabilities. Personally, I don’t find this as important as side-band ECC support. My family NAS is primarily an efficient, secure, private data vault, rather than a media server or NVR. Transcoding capabilities can be added via Oculink, USB4 / Thunderbolt, one of the PCIe expansion slots (Intel Arc) or even a cheap mini PC (Intel N-series).
Aside: That said, it’s 2025 and neither ECC or transcoding are exotic technologies anymore. Intel and AMD really should stop segmenting the market over these particular features! /grumble
The closest model QNAP currently offers is the TS-473A. It was a fantastic NAS when it launched, but the V1500B processor is 6 years old and the PCIe 3.0 lanes are a generation behind the times. I was really hoping QNAP would launch a successor model at CES 2025, but I haven’t seen any announcements. Instead, QNAP is facing fierce innovative competition from Asustor (AS68) and Minisforum (N5).
Is QNAP preparing to launch a successor to the TS-473A please?
£1000 would be (much) more than the ~3¾ year old TS-473A it replaces, as well as its siblings the TS-673A, the TS-873A (just, amazon.co.uk) and the TS-h973AX-8G. £1000 would place it between it’s newer ECC neighbours - the TS-432X and the TS-855X.
Asustor’s AS6804T is generally regarded as overpriced, but it does come with more hardware out of the box than my list. With less ports in favour of two empty PCIe slots, QNAP could likely be competitive and make additional profit via their wide array of expensive expansion cards as add-on sales. They’re also a bigger company which gives them access to better economies of scale.
I’d make the case that Tower NAS price creep can only go so high before customers look elsewhere, even with inflation taken into account. Especially with increasing competition.
you mentioned Asustor as a NAS your wanting QNAP to clone or be better.
With respect, I never suggested a clone of the AS6804T. Quite the contrary. It’s over-specced and overpriced. Asustor has maxed everything out so that not a shred of I/O is spared, including their version of an expansion slot which comes pre-populated with the daughterboard containing the 4 M.2 slots. In that respect, it’s arguably not very customisable.
QNAP’s approach is more modular which allows them to appeal to a wider audience. So their barebones NAS towers contain less peripheral hardware and less PCIe switches. They leave it up to the customer to customize the NAS with expansion cards as add-on sales with guaranteed compatibility. This allows them to be more competitive on their core pricing. It’s a smart business strategy.
When I stated two options in my specifications list (e.g. 4/8 or 6/12), the first is the “should have” and the second is the “nice to have”. In many cases, the “should have” (which is what matters) are half of what the competition offers.
For the sake of argument, a QNAP NAS with modern CPU, but half the onboard ports and half the prepopulated memory of the AS6804T, would be more than enough for many customers if it came with QNAP’s trademark expandability. It would be cheaper than the competition and would probably be more profitable because of a larger customer base and lucrative add-on sales.
For what it’s worth, my personal compromise is to wait longer. With the current trajectory of bus and network speeds over the next 5+ years, the next generation of bus lane bandwidth is worth the wait.