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.
I think TS-h886 is closest to your list. No 40gb USB and not under budget. Can easily upgrade ram to 32gb without waisting the stock 16gb. You are probably not going to see 4bay with the CPU you want. And any 4 bay will probably not come from QNAP with ECC.
That said - it meets none of the gold plated specs you listed
If all it is is a Data vault then it should work fine.
M.2 slots are Gen3x1 (1GB/s) - Be forewarned!
USB to 3.2 - good enough for 90% of the world.
The PCIe slots are half height limiting the cards and any card will find it a tight fit!
SFP+ to SFP28?? I do 500Mb Fiber and RARELY saturate; what home system requires that level of bandwidth and WHY would it be pushed “Through(??)” a NAS??
four cores (maybe less, but I did stuff two TPU cards in the M.2 slots!)
64GB Ecc is easy
That said, I do just fine with 3x8TB Raid5 SATA for base storage, the fourth slot is a 16TB “Backup” drive, and a 500GB OS/Applications SSD on a QM2-2P-344A card for Gen3x4. Tagging along is an old USB SSD to capture odd backups and archives. USB4 for “full backup” backup is “old school” when a snapshot takes half a minute, and ripping a 16TB drive out on a moments notice is so easy.
The device has almost 200k images, 5k videos (mine, not movies), and a TB of archived laptops, applications, and CD (remember those?). On the slow drives, it is plenty fast - not video editing level or anything - but gets the job done nicely. Operationally, I use container station to run dev ops databases, apps instances, and indexing services. The SSD apps and Containers is just fine for the level of demand the “Family” places on it.
Not using it for Network Utilities (That’s all on OpenWRT on a RockChip Device, though I may offload Snort analysis to TS-473A in future). This provides a CLEAR segregation of activities meaning if “they” get the router, they probably aren’t going to get the NAS before I discover the breach. Not using for AD or authentication (my bad - just lazy). Not running VM’s (Containers are preferred). UPS is on the Network device as that has a higher security and operations priority.
I guess the point is, anyone can build a device that is the envy of the world. But the smart money is on the build that does exactly what is needed operationally with a lower out of pocket expenditure == higher efficiency.
For me, the TS-473A has been pretty sweet for EVERYTHING that has been asked of it, sitting quietly on a little corner shelf in the basement.