Pros: good price, ease of setup

Cons: buggy software, excessive updates, unnecessary redundant options
Poor USB audio compatibility

Other Thoughts: I decided to change from Synology to QNAP for my latest NAS. Others stated that QNAP had come a long way. Well, they still have a long way to go to reach the robust execution and compatibility of my 5 year old Synology NAS. So many issues I tried to deal with. Worst of all, I let the 30 day period go by , so I am stuck with this turkey!

Pros: Easy setup
Easy Management
Hardware is superior to "other" options

Cons: Software is not as mature or friendly as synology
Why did it have to be white - HATE the color
Too many models with identical descriptions, though I was buying the 4GB version ... ended up with the 1GB.

Other Thoughts: I work with NETAPP, IBM and EMC storage so I found this to be fairly easy to configure and use.
New users may not find it so easy. I would not recommend this to anyone who did not understand what a RAID was or what the different RAID levels are and how they perform.
I am not using PLEX on the NAS, but have my media on an iSCSI LUN which my PLEX server connects to. No issues at all.
When transferring files I commonly see transfer rates around 90MB/s on this.
My synology 214 would top out around 60.
Not much more to say ... if you know what you are doing this is a great unit buy it.
If you are new to networked storage you will have a bit of a learning curve, but should be OK as long as you can google.
OH ... put NAS drives in it ... if you put cheap green drives in a NAS you should not own a NAS.

Pros: 4 bays I guess. Nothing really good to say about this NAS at all since it's basically useless to me.

Cons: Set up is a pain. Maybe it's because I am used to my Thecus interface, but this NAS is horrible if you just want to be able to plug it in as a server and have it work. With my Thecus NAS, any laptop I have, when I connect to the network, the NAS populates and I am able to access it easily.
The QNAP doesn't show up in the network at all. I'm sure it's some configuration thing, but the GUI of setting up the QNAP is horrible. I've spend hours on it with no success. Worst interface for an NAS ever.

Other Thoughts: Never rely on reviews from companies that are receiving money from the manufacturer, because they are not impartial. I should never have bought a QNAP, and won't make the same mistake again.

Manufacturer Response:

Dear Darren B.,
Sorry to hear about what you are currently experiencing with our TS-451, as this is not the intended or typical experience with the device.
We will work closely with newegg team to provide you better shopping and product experience
within 30 days of purchase, Newegg can return or replace a unit for you.
after 30 days of purchase, please contact QNAP technical support
we will arrange a new unit for you

If our support team can be of any assistance to you, please contact us via email or phone below and reference this Newegg review.
(909) 595-2782
http://www.qnap.com/i/useng/about/con_show.php?op=showone&cid=1

Pros: Very easy to set up. Very fast, quiet, and many features.

Cons: None so far.

Other Thoughts: I purchased this NAS a month ago and very happy with it. I replaced the 1GB RAM with 8 GB Kingston DDR3 RAM. Everything seems to be great so far.

Pros: Incredibly easy set up. So far no issues. See other thoughts.

Cons: Only comes with 1 GB ram

Other Thoughts: First NAS install ever for me. Intended use = Adding shared disk for the home network. Took just a couple of hours to swap in 8GB ram, add 4 Seagate NAS 4TB hard drives, connect to network, update firmware and start moving files around. I should have done this years ago. Auto recognizes APC UPS. Great apps for android...and I'm streaming music/video to a smart TV...all accomplished between 6 and 9 pm...WOW!

Pros: Great interface with the new firmware.
Does the basics without a hitch, as i use this device for most everything it has to offer. I use the FTP, Time machine, Rsync, vmware host, iso library, PS3 game storage :) with ps3netsrv, a gmail backup, a drop box backup, a seed box, and surveillance station.
Cloud is great for the basics, accessing music or movies on the go.
Rsync like a champ typically see 70Mb/s wire speeds for copy move operations and 100+ for iscsi or block commands. not bad for 1Gbe.

Cons: it has its quirks i wont deny, but after dropping in 16GB of high speed low latency ddr3 its a champ. all the buggyness and cpu load goes right away.
while opened i also changed the heatsync and thermal paste. seems to enjoy being fairly cool
Had to use WD red drives 6TB, seagates and others failed like crazy the nas drives are the way to go with this thing.

Other Thoughts: ive gone between synology thecus and qnap. qnap seems to be the middle of the road.
synology is way overpriced, Thecus has the best performance my light years, but 0 support. Qnap is easier to bootstrap and compile software on.
i only took an egg off because it has a tendancy slow down large file transfers over time, but i think its because they dont use the new SMB protocols. or the ethernet hardware need an update. but do as i do and team the nics and your right as rain.

Pros: Holds 4-4tb hot-swappable drives, fast. Used as an 8tb scientific data archive, raid 1.

Cons: Lots of plastic; dead after 6mos - will switch back to Synology, which we've used for years; prefer Synology software.

Other Thoughts: Will not power on at all so there is no possibility of trouble-shooting. Got a RMA from Synology after some basic trouble-shooting attempts.
I ordered a Synology DS415+ replacement. I've been using Synology products for years but was curious about the QNap NAS since they are rated so highly on smallnetbuilder. I was somewhat disappointed with the QNap software but that could be because I'm so accustomed to Synology's.

Manufacturer Response:

Dear James W.,
Sorry to hear about what you are currently experiencing with our TS-451, as this is not the intended or typical experience with the device.
We will work closely with newegg team to provide you better shopping and product experience

If our support team can be of any assistance to you, please contact us via email or phone below and reference this Newegg review.
(909) 595-2782
http://www.qnap.com/i/useng/about/con_show.php?op=showone&cid=1

Pros: Nice UI interface, mostly standard Linux OS, Good tech support

Cons: Reliability is rather suspect.

Other Thoughts: The true test of any NAS is it's reliability. I've owned this TS-451 since 04/15 and it's definitely provided it's share of challenges. My device is configured as a 4-bay RAID5.

The first issue was due to the NAS thinking 3 of 4 drives had failed. During this time, it tried to reboot itself and recover. As part of this process, it took the 3 suspected disks offline and out of the RAID.

I logged into the WebUI, and gracefully shutdown the NAS. Upon reboot, it showed all 4 drives were "OK" and no errors. However, since it had already tried to remove the 3 supposedly failed drives, it had lost it's internal RAID configuration. I ran some diagnostics on the drives etc, and all reported good - but now my RAID configuration was gone.

A chat with online tech support luckily solved the problem. He was able to re-create the RAID configuration from command line and now the RAID was rebuilding. This was non-destructive, so I still held up hope of recovering all my data.

After rebuilding completed, the RAID configuration was still not right. It showed I had 1 unused disk and my RAID was running on 3 disks, yet somehow still reported I had the full disk capacity of a 4 drive RAID5. I quickly backed up all my data before doing anything else.

Next day, another chat with online tech support - this time, they manually added back the 4th disk to the RAID5 and everything looked back to normal. Full RAID5 using all 4 disks and all my data recovered.

Fast forward a few weeks to this week - I gracefully shutdown my QNAP to install it on a UPS. Shutdown was fine, and the UI told me that the system was shutdown now. I unplug the QNAP, install the UPS, and plug the QNAP back in.

Now it won't power up! I check the power supply and something about it is fishy. It reads ~12V as it should. However, after I plug the Power Supply into the NAS and try to power up the NAS, nothing happens. I check the power supply with a voltmeter again, and now it's registering 0 Volts! I unplug the Power Supply, plug it back in, and it's back to 12V. I push the power button and now it's 0V. Time to contact support for the 3rd time.

Something is definitely not right as now my QNAP is a boat anchor - it doesn't turn on. I've only had it for 3-4 months but this QNAP has certainly given me my share of headaches.

I've had a Zyxel NSA220 for 7-8 years and it's NEVER given me any problems. It's been rock solid.

I wish I could say the same about this QNAP TS-451, but so far, reliability has been very suspect. When it works, it's fantastically fast. I just wish that these 2 hiccups in the last 4 months wouldn't happen.

Buy at your own peril but IMHO, I think QNAP cut a few too many corners in trying to keep this on the "cheap". I don't trust my QNAP anymore and thus back up my data on a few different devices now. I never know when it will die (maybe it already has but I'm hoping a new power supply will resolve the issue).

Pros: - Price!
- Easy setup and management
- Pretty solid firmware

Cons: - Inadequate processor for media server
- Slow performance
- Some native software is a bit buggy

Other Thoughts: The TS-451 is billed as a media server solution, which is exactly what I purchased it to do. I have a large media library consisting of HD video and lossless music content and the TS-451 was meant to be a single location to store and serve up these files, locally and remotely, via the pre-installed Plex Media Server and a couple of the native Qnap apps. It serves files ok on my LAN, although a bit choppy, but the Celeron processor is not powerful enough to transcode and serve HD files remotely. It chokes and stutters constantly and is unwatchable. I have ample upload bandwidth available and upgrading to 8GB of RAM (as I did) does nothing to aid in transcoding, as this is a processor intensive task.

This NAS will probably work fine strictly as a storage solution, but I cannot recommend it at all as a media server and Qnap shouldn't be advertising it as such, not with such a low-end processor.

Pros: Very fast, data transfer max out my gigabit LAN connection.
Added two 8GB ram sticks, so that it has 16 GB ram. Enough RAM to run multiple Linux VMs at the same time.

Cons: plastic drive trays