QNAP TS-253D-4G 2 Bay NAS for Professionals with Intel® Celeron® J4125 CPU and Two 2.5GbE Ports

I'm an IT person. I use this as a destination for the daily backup of my main computer's data drive and it runs my pihole (network ad and web site blocker). It also holds a monthly image backup of my PC - just the operating system. You can choose various RAID levels (hard drive redundancy modes) to help protect your data. But RAID is NOT protection against everything.For my small business customers, I use these as centralized file servers for small offices. However you use it, I have to point out something that another 1 star reviewer complained about. They had lost everything due to a hack. First, do NOT expose this product to the internet. Any device exposed to the internet is at risk. Second, you must have backup if you store your data on these devices. It should be something off site - cloud backup. Even if you use RAID (redundant) disk drives, it is NOT a substitute for having a backup of your data somewhere that is NOT on this device. I would say the same thing if you store your data on your PC.Finally, I would caution people that these devices are much more complicated than setting up your average router. The user interface is very easy, but there are lots of things to configure - network config/users/passwords/shared folders/anti-virus/backup, etc. You can even run a virtual PC inside this device - Windows or Linux.

First NAS, switched over from using my PC and YES!!! It is so easy to use and no prior knowledge needed. When first setting up the drive was a little louder than I imagined, but once I finished transferring about 10TB, it quieted down and runs smoothly and quietly. I definitely recommend. I paired mine with a 16TB Seagate Iron Wolf Pro. Seamless. I'm not a super user, I made the switch because my PLEX library has grown tremendously and I wanted to take advantage of the transcoding capabilities for those accessing the the library abroad. They can now watch everything with the original quality with no issues. For, the person needed extra storage and cloud access, I recommend fully. The QNAP apps allow me to access my files from anywhere and make changes via my iPhone as well.

Read a lot of comparisons to Synology Diskstation. I used Synology for 10 years. It was pretty good, but I did not do much other than using it as storage and reverse proxy. Took a shot for the cheaper security camera licenses of what Qnap has. It is better than I expected. There are many reviews saying bad UIs. I think the UI is ok to me. Lots of fun with lots of configuration though I had to do lots of researches to make decisions on the configuration. I mainly use it for security cameras and video streaming. The memory upgrade was easy. Added one 16GB (Timetec Hynix IC) to make it 20GB with no issue. Did not do the PCIe SSD cache as I do not plan to run VMs. I found that there are very cheap PCIe cards that can work with NVMe m.2 memory. I might do it later. No need to buy the original expansion card. Really a better deal than Synology from a hardware standpoint. I guess I am a bit concern about security as it is more open to 3rd party software, and that could be riskier from a security standpoint. I would not put anything sensitive on NAS anyway. The best security is to keep things offline.Update: After 2 months, I found one problem that I do not like. With the cheap PCIe card for NVMe m.2 memory, I can only use the SSD as cache memory. I can not do Qtier. It is also not good as cache memory for write cache as it could fail before writing it to my HDD. This makes me believe now Synology might be a better option if you really want to have m.2 SSD because it is built-in for Synology NAS. Qnap is not cheaper if I need to buy the RAID PCIe card. Well, I guess I am still getting cheap security camera licenses. For this reason, I took out one star.

I bought this NAS to replace a QNAP TS-451 mini NAS that was five years old and repeatedly showed a failed hard disk in slot 2 even when new HD's were inserted in that slot. I contacted QNAP Support and they said the backplane was faulty. When I received this new NAS unit, I moved the same drives in the TVS-451 over to the TS-453D and again I got a red failure light on slot 2. At that point I removed the drive in slot 2 and subjected it to a full system test using DriveDX. After several hours the test completed with no errors and no issues reported. I put this drive back into slot 2 and the new TS-453D immediately began rebuilding the raid. Since then I have had no further issues with the TS-453D or the hard drives in it. I suspect that there was nothing wrong with the older TS-451 and I have kept it as a backup NAS. I was not impressed with the lack of knowledge of the QNAP support person in this instance. I do find the TS-453D to be fast, quiet, well-but and so far reliable. I like the QTS software that QNAP uses for their NAS.