INTRODUCTION

   Even though centralized file sharing has always been of extreme importance for operations both in offices and businesses (small and large) it's very impressive to see that nowadays it's also something many home users have come to care much about. This is one of the reasons behind the why NAS (network attached storage) servers have found their way into countless homes all over the world. Still for home users NAS servers provide much more in terms of features than just file sharing since one can use them for a long list of things such as to host a website, download files (either directly or via torrent), record IP camera feeds (network video recording), playback media files, send/receive and filter emails, load different operating systems (virtualization) and much more. QNAP has been leading the NAS market for as far back as i can remember and today with us we have their second M.2 SATA based NAS to date, the TBS-453DX-8G.

   QNAP Systems, Inc., headquartered in Taipei, Taiwan, provides a comprehensive range of cutting-edge Network-attached Storage (NAS) and video surveillance solutions based on the principles of usability, high security, and flexible scalability. QNAP offers quality NAS products for home and business users, providing solutions for storage, backup/snapshot, virtualization, teamwork, multimedia, and more. QNAP envisions NAS as being more than "simple storage", and has created many NAS-based innovations to encourage users to host and develop Internet of Things, artificial intelligence, and machine learning solutions on their QNAP NAS.

   Thanks to its very compact size the original NASbook (TBS-453A) was an overall good concept by QNAP which didn't really take off mainly because of two things, first the factory mounted M.2 SATA drives only added up to 960GB (not nearly enough for serious use, plus cost) and it lacked 10G connectivity. For its successor QNAP replaced it's Intel Celeron N3150 quad-core 1.6GHz processor (2.08GHz boost) with the newer J4105 quad-core 1.5GHz model (2.5GHz boost) while its 4/8GB DDR3L 1600MHz SODIMM RAM was replaced with brand new 4/8GB DDR4L 2400MHz modules. Now even though the TBS-453DX also features four M.2 2280 SATA 6Gb/s slots, two 3.5mm microphone ports (dynamic microphones only) and a line out audio jack everything else has changed since this time over QNAP has equipped it with 4 USB 2.0 ports (instead of the single USB 2.0 one found in its predecessor), 3 USB 3.0 ports (4 USB 3.0 ports for its predecessor), single HDMI v2.0 port (2 ports in the previous model), single RJ45 Gigabit ethernet port (5 for its predecessor) and a single 10G BASE-T (10G/5G/2.5G/1G/100M) port. So, let's see if these changes are enough to place the TBS-453DX where its predecessor should had been, at least in terms of sales.