QNAP TS-451 Review

After the wizard guides you through your configuration, administering your NAS is done through a slick web interface.  The interface hasn’t changed from other models and everything is right where you’d expect it to be. Administration is as easy as 1,2,3. Adding users, groups, and shares can be accomplished in a matter of minutes.

Immediately after logging in for the first time, QNAP will guide you through QTS, highlighting some of the key features.

The various icons are iOS’ish and provide a clear indication as to their purpose. Up top, you have quick access to various NAS functions. From left to right, the three bars on the left hide a fly out menu, the Home button with hostname shows the desktop when clicked, you have task-bar for open applications, a go to myQNAPcloud button, indicator for background tasks (such as backup schedules), external devices (like battery backups and printers), Event Notification, your logged in user, search, resources, language, and finally desktop preferences.

Under the logged in user, you have quick access to your wallpaper preferences, your last login time, changing your password, logging out, as well as power functions for the NAS (sleep, restart, shutdown).

General Administration is broken down into 4 major sections. All of which have a number of subsections with tons of configurable items.

• System Settings
• Privilege Settings
• Network Services
• Applications

System Settings is where you will configure all the basic elements of your NAS.

General Settings:

• System Administration: Server Name, System Port, hide features like Photo Station, enable SSL
• Time: Adjust the date, time, and time zone according to the location of the NAS
• Daylight Savings Time
• Codepage: Select the filename encoding for non-Unicode file name conversion
• Password Strength: Specify the password rules
• Login Screen: Select a template for the login screen

Storage manager: Manage volumes and RAID systems, monitor the health of hard drives, encrypt and decrypt file systems, and configure iSCSI systems and virtual disks with Storage Manager.

• Volume Management: This page shows the model, size, and current status of the hard drives on the NAS
• RAID Management
• Hard Disk S.M.A.R.T: Monitor the hard disk drives (HDD) health, temperature, and the usage status by HDD S.M.A.R.T.
• Encrypted File System
• iSCSI
• Virtual Disk: You can use this function to add the iSCSI targets of other QNAP NAS or storage servers to the NAS as the virtual disks for storage capacity expansion.

Network: This is where you find your NAS communication skills. You can quick access to link status, configure port trunking, wifi, IPv6, Bind services to specific interfaces, configure a proxy, and enable a Dynamic DNS service. This is useful if you don’t use QNAP’s cloud solution.