QNAP QuTS hero NASbook TBS-h574TX-i3-12G, 12GB RAM, 1x RJ-45 10GBase-T, 1x RJ-45 2.5GBase-T

The QNAP TBS-h574TX is a neat little NAS and offers excellent features for creative professionals. The peculiar choice to use E1.S drives makes this NAS pretty flexible in terms of storage and, dare I say, a bit future-proofed. EDSFF is where a lot of flash-based storage is going, and while M.2 is by no means “dead,” it is no longer the primary focus for many enterprise storage manufacturers. It makes the longevity of this NAS just a bit longer as capacities will likely continue to increase for the E1.S form factor. It also makes up for the lack of PCIe expandability, which isn’t practical in this small chassis.

This certainly isn’t the NAS for everyone, and if you’re just at home wanting some backups, and somewhere to dump your Plex server for a few movies, it’s complete overkill. However, suppose like us you need to move massive files between multiple devices for content creation, be that game development, video editing or music production. In that case, it can be a very powerful tool indeed. The biggest benefit here, as far as I can see, is the 10GbE networking. When you combine that with the blazing-fast speeds that are possible on either M.2 or E1.S drives, you can far exceed the performance of more traditional 3.5″ drive NAS configurations. With traditional HDD you need to use RAID5 with 10 drives just to get to around 900-1000mbps transfer speeds, however, with M.2 you can use relatively cheaper NVMe drives without RAID, and still get even higher speeds. While we only used 1TB drives you can go much more beyond that on M.2 and E1.S with 4TB and sometimes 8TB drives being viable options if you’ve got deep enough pockets for them. Furthermore, the new E1.S drives are built bigger than M.2 drives and allow for more robust feature sets, that can further enhance your NAS experience. With support for a range of RAID configurations, have plenty of flexibility on how you choose to deploy the five available bays. The powerful processor, extremely fast networking, and fast SSD support, make light work of keeping up with heavy workloads and I doubt having a large set of users accessing this drive would pose any issue for it, and while the performance we saw in our own testing is impressive, it’s still barely scratching the surface oh how fast you could push this unit. With support for Windows and Mac users, the QNAP runs the TBS-h574TX runs the ZFS-based QuTS hero operating system, however, if you prefer a more traditional QNAP experience, you can run the QTS operating system too.