INTRODUCTION

   This may surprise some of you but according to a some independent studies/projections (conducted since 2014) by 2020 almost 80% of all households in the US and EU will own at least one NAS device. In reality this is not something unexpected especially since the role of NAS devices has gradually expanded to much more than just centralized network storage. As i type these lines consumers can use NAS devices as web servers (to host their very own websites), email servers (which not only send and receive but also filter incoming messages), download servers (used to download data both directly via HTTP/FTP and/or via torrent), media servers (can share/seed media to computers and smartphones), network video recorders (IP camera compatibility grows longer each day) and much more. Still what we don’t see much in the industry are compact yet high-end NAS models which people can actually use even in their very own bedrooms without having to worry about waking them up in the middle of the night. QNAP has released some such solutions in the past and since they did become quite successful it was only natural for them to revamp some of them and release them again. Today’s review is about one such model and more specifically the TS-453Bmini-8G.

   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. More information is at www.qnap.com.

   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 was actually amongst the most powerful NAS servers to ever reach our lab sporting a 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) and up to 8GB DDR3L RAM clocked at 1333MHz. Still due to high demand QNAP took it back to the drawing board and this time over equipped it with the latest quad-core Intel Celeron J3455 CPU clocked at 1.5GHz (2.3GHz burst, 64Bit, 2MB L2 Cache, 14nm) with its 9^th generation Intel HD Graphics 500 (250Mhz base frequency with 750Mhz burst) and up to 8GB DDR3L RAM clocked at 1600MHz. The rest pretty much remain the same so just like the TS-453Mini the new TS-453BMini 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 (4k 3840x2160 max) 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-453BMini supports everything we've seen so far with most NAS models by QNAP so nothing really to worry here when it comes to available usages.