We are the winners. A few years ago, my lovely wife and son were searching for an NAS solution for our home office. They chose QNAP, specifically the TS-419P II. Having suffered through abuse from HP, I figured we’d be replacing this box in a few years. Not so. QNAP NAS major win for support for their older models.
The TS-419P II is a standard, four-bay box. You must supply and install the drives. Originally the firmware supported 8tb. We installed 4 x 2tb Samsung drives with RAID zero configuration.
Then a couple of years later we needed more space. (My lovely wife is a semi-professional photographer gradually moving into video.) With a simple firmware upgrade, we replaced the Samsung drives with 4 x 4tb Seagate drives. Presto … well, there was a fair wait getting the RAID to rebuild when we did a hot-install of the fourth drive … we had 8tb of NAS.
Today for reasons that are none of your business (involving tax stuff, you really don’t want to know), I decided to check for firmware updates. Sure enough, 4.1.3 was available. Here’s the description:
ARE YOU KIDDING ME? A BETTER ALGORITHM FOR THE SMART FAN?!??!! For a box we bought years ago? At a price of zero?
If you’re looking for NAS, I can give my unqualified endorsement to QNAP. Regular readers will understand how unusual this is. For newcomers, here’s the quick summary: NEVER.