So wanted to take a bit on testing t his Nas out and giving my honest review.
I have all 5 bays filled with Seagate Ironwold pro 18tb 7200RPM 256MB Cache NAS drives and then 2 SSD 512GB in lower 2 bays and then 2x 2TB NVME Samsung 980 pro in U.2 QDA-UMP housings.
On the 5x 18tb drives I have several ZFS directories setup for different functions, though the transfer rate on these drives tens to top out around 1.09 ~ 1.12 GB/sec from my main pc.
On the other drives the U.2 its always topped out at 1.12GB/sec and around 950~980MB/sec on the SSD's.
The transfer speed on this nas is amazing to say the least I had the TVS-951X with 10G network and the same drives and only would get around 400MB/sec no matter what drives I had it going to. I contacted Qnap various times on this device and they would try a few things and nothing ever would fix the horrific transfer speeds, they deemed it defective, though the replacement unit suffered exactly the same fate which told me it was a limitation of the device not any one thing.
Though after testing a friends TS-H973AX and getting full 10Gbit speed on it, I bought one of these and it works beautifully.
The OS on boot tends to be a bit slower then other Qnaps I have though its not really a metric you should be worried about.
This device supports ECC memory and running ZFS it is highly recommended, I upgraded to 32GB of ECC memory on this device and it worked right away no fiddling with it or having the ram not work at all which I had experienced on other Qnap devices.
The features of this device are extensive, from surveillance software to hosting and docker it does what you need it to do for sure.
I run plex on the device and it is flawless and fast playing 4k HEVC 10bit HDR and Dolby Atmos audio with out a hiccup. It transcodes if needed like a beast, the cpu is more then capable of on the fly transcoding to lower resolutions if need be.
It came with Qnaps QTS Hero 4.3 which now had 5.0 out and I would highly recommend does fix a lot of quirky things in the OS.
Only down side I would say is that the security options for IP access is still lacking support, there is only allow all ips in list or deny, no white list no options for a white list.
I get attempts left and right from people trying to log into my nas from the internet, though I use this as a storage device for projects and stuff when I'm out and about, I dont feel like paying for a service to store stuff online when I have plenty of storage at home.
If Qnap would work on the security options and give us an option to white list IP addresses it would go just that extra step in protecting peoples nas's that really do require it to be online.
All in all its a purchase I dont regret, it works great, speed is amazing and its built like it should, just needs a few loving updates to security options.
| Brand | QNAP |
|---|---|
| Series | TS-h973AX |
| Item model number | TS-h973AX-8G |
| Item Weight | 10.38 pounds |
| Product Dimensions | 8.82 x 8.82 x 7.17 inches |
| Item Dimensions LxWxH | 8.82 x 8.82 x 7.17 inches |
| Manufacturer | QNAP |
| ASIN | B08QRYS9B9 |
| Country of Origin | Taiwan |
| Date First Available | December 16, 2020 |
