INTRODUCTION

   When NAS servers made their main debut in the market well over a decade ago they were designed to be a easy to deploy centralized storage solution which could provide local systems with large amounts of available storage capacity and data. Since then however things have changed for the best and so currently NAS servers can be used for many things including file sharing, web hosting, direct and torrent downloads, local backups, media streaming and sharing and of course as email servers. With the recent arrival of the Virtualization feature high-end NAS servers can also be configured to run your OS of choice thus further widening their range of uses. Still if there's one thing i always felt missing from that market that's a compact yet high-end NAS model which i could place even in my own bedroom and not worry about it waking me up in the middle of the night. Well QNAP seems to share my thoughts and so they just released the TurboNAS TS-453Mini, a powerful yet quiet 4 bay NAS.

   QNAP Systems, Inc., as its brand promise "Quality Network Appliance Provider", aims to deliver comprehensive offerings of cutting edge network attached storage (NAS) and network video recorder (NVR) solutions featured with ease-of-use, robust operation, large storage capacity, and trustworthy reliability. QNAP integrates technologies and designs to bring forth quality products that effectively improve business efficiency on file sharing, virtualization applications, storage management and surveillance in the business environments, as well as enrich entertainment life for home users with the offering of a fun multimedia center experience. Headquartered in Taipei, QNAP delivers its solutions to the global market with nonstop innovation and passion.

   Unlike the SilentNAS series again by QNAP which featured good hardware specifications but nothing exciting in order to support their passive cooling system the TS-453Mini is actually amongst the most powerful NAS servers to ever reach our lab. This is not only because of the quad-core Intel Celeron J1900 CPU running at 2GHz (64Bit, 2MB L2 cache, 22nm) with its Intel® HD Graphics Mesa DRI Bay Trail running at 688MHz (OpenGL 3.0 Mesa 10.2.2) found under the hood of the TS-453Mini but also due to the amount of DDR3L RAM which in our model is 8GB running at 1333MHz (this is also the maximum amount supported by this CPU). The TS-453Mini also has room for up to four 3.5/2.5" SATA III drives, 2 Gigabit RJ45 Ethernet ports, 3 USB 3.0 ports, 2 USB 2.0 ports, HDMI v1.4a port and a build-in IR sensor which can be used with their RM-IR002 remote control (included in the bundle). In terms of software features the TS-453Mini supports everything we've seen so far with most NAS models by QNAP but ontop of all of these it also supports their latest Virtualization station which basically allows the end user to install other operating systems (for example Windows and Linux) in separate drive partitions. So let's move forward with our review to see just how good this "silent" NAS model by QNAP really is.