QNAP TS-216G-US – The Most Affordable 2-Bay 2.5GbE Desktop NAS, Equipped with ARM Cortex-A55 Quad-Core CPU, Built-in NPU and 4GB DDR4 RAM (Diskless)

Don’t believe the competitor’s hype, QNAP’s OS and this NAS are solid and easy to setup.
I had bought a Synology twin drive NAS. That NAS was horribly underpowered. Slow and very sluggish when trying to manage it with their apps. I ended up selling it and buying this beast -for the price. And as the title states, don’t buy the (professional) reviews” on how superior their software is. This QNAP may not be a cakewalk to set up, configure, and customize, but it IS easy. Once you get it setup, you’ll probably never have to access it again unless you want to. Its configuration and features are very robust from permissions, alerts, settings, very useful apps and more. The QNAP’s interface is somewhat like a smartphone, with square app icons on your choice web browser.It’s a great NAS. Don’t let the hype steer you towards lower performance and hardware for the price.

A Nice, Low Cost NAS…
I got this to replace/augment an aging ReadyNAS Pro 2. Installed two 3 TB drives with no major issues and was up and running.My only negative comment is that the setup and configuration software seems overly complex, confusing, and like many modern computer “stuff” obsessed with “security!”.It has some silly auto-snapshot capability that seems senseless to me–coming from an era of daily, then stored off-site, backups; “backing up” data on the same devices it’s stored on does nothing but bring a false sense of security.Initially it wanted to reserve 20% of the total space for this idiocy, however after some online research I was able to disable it and reclaim that space. It is well-documented by QNAP, which is good as the browser-based configuration management is disjointed and confusing.The 2.5 Gb Ethernet port works well–Gigabit is kind of sluggish in this modern world…

Terrific backup tool to use with Time Machine
When my time capsule finally died, I had to find a replacement. This was the second item I tried. I needed some help getting it set up. The QNAP utility was easy enough to use, but I couldn’t find the command to get Time Machine to see the device. But a call to their Help Desk solve the issue.I am especially impressed with how quickly I can access the files and recover them. On the Time Capsule, it was always a very slow process, waiting for the machine to make contact. But the QNAP is connecting and retrieving files so much faster that it’s become a lot more reliable as a backup.

Worth it for the price.
Pretty good for the price! I have this set up for backups and as a media server. Instead of using the built in apps, i tunnel access through a website for remote access.There are some really weird reviews on here and i wanted to address some of them.one guy said “the setup and configuration software seems overly complex, confusing, and like many modern computer “stuff” obsessed with “security!”.It has some silly auto-snapshot capability that seems senseless to me–coming from an era of daily, then stored off-site, backups; “backing up” data on the same devices it’s stored on does nothing but bring a false sense of security.”So, this device potentially has personal information on it and has the ability to let you access it from the the internet. That is a huge security risk if you arent protected with an abundance of security measures. it can see obsessive, but trust me its not. If you didn’t have these measures and connected it to the internet anyway, its not IF, its WHEN you will get hacked.Snapshot, you can connect an external drive to the NAS and use that for snapshot purposes. even if you kept the snapshot on the drives you are using in the NAS, its a small compressed copy that can be accessed and extracted by professionals in the event of a disk failure.someone elsel complained that its loud… its probably a defective unit or the hard drives used. I used two 10TB WD red drives and i dont hear anything. Only beeping when rebooting.The only thing i personally dont like about it is that its a little slow and laggy, not terrible. then i tried watching a high quality 1080p video while transcribing on-the-fly and it couldnt do it, it was choppy. the best way to watch videos off of this is via VLC player which is available on almost everything. we have it on our Apple TV, Xbox, phones, laptops, tabletc, etc and all access the NAS easily.Setting this up with the built in apps is pretty easy, I used chatGPT to help set up my own access as im weary of software and devices designed to house data and are from China.Overall, i think its a great machine for the price, but i think im going to build my own server next time.

Very easy to set up. Unfortunately the software reformatted drives I had in my old NAS and I lost everything on them.

Ich hatte schon immer Qnap und bin immer noch begeistert.