QNAP TS-855X NAS Review – Solid Xeon Alternative?

The QNAP TS-855X NAS Drive Review

The QNAP TS-855X NAS enters the network-attached storage market promising robust performance and high scalability, targeting businesses and advanced users with substantial data needs. Despite its commendable feature set, the device doesn’t come without its shortcomings. In this detailed review, we’ll navigate through every facet of the TS-855X – from the unassuming packaging to the expansive connectivity options and powerful internal hardware – all the while keeping a keen eye on its potential drawbacks. My objective is to provide a balanced evaluation to help you discern if the TS-855X truly offers the value for money it is asking for! So, today I want to review the new TS-855X private NAS server, drill down to how the brand has taken a different stance on 10GbE and its accompanying hardware this time around and break down its software platform into where its strengths and weaknesses are. Let’s go!

QNAP TS-855X NAS Review – Quick Conclusion

I have to say, I am MOSTLY impressed by how much bang for buck is being included in the TS-855X and although it is not the most powerful device in the market (arguably intentionally, as it favours the more affordable Atom over a xeon), it is a sensible workhorse of a NAS. On the positive side, the QNAP TS-855X NAS comes with numerous strong selling points. The device offers large storage potential, especially with the ZFS file system, making it a powerhouse for data management. The choice of CPU is also sensible, providing a balance between performance and cost-effectiveness. The inclusion of the QTier tool is particularly appealing, adding a layer of efficiency to the storage management. Another big plus is the user-friendly GUI for ZFS in QuTS, making it accessible for users with varying levels of technical expertise. The three-tier storage options and support of ECC memory with a maximum of 128GB further enhance the device’s versatility and potential. Moreover, the TS-855X provides a wealth of expansion options and comes with 8 camera licenses with QVR Pro/QTS. The well-ventilated design contributes to thermal efficiency, ensuring optimal performance, while its support for the latest 22TB and soon-to-be-released 24TB drives future-proofs your investment.

However, the TS-855X is not without its drawbacks. While the two SATA SSD bays provide extra storage options, they would have been better if they were U.2 slots, which offer faster speeds. Although the device supports ECC memory, the initial 8GB memory in the base model is non-ECC, which might not be optimal for all ZFS services. The memory capacity might also be somewhat low for users with intensive data needs. Furthermore, the software can sometimes be inconsistent under heavy use, and it has a steeper learning curve compared to competitors like Synology. Finally, the pricing structure for the TS-855X is a mixed bag. While some users may find the cost reasonable given its features, others might feel it’s a bit steep for what it offers. Therefore, while the QNAP TS-855X NAS offers a plethora of attractive features and strong performance, it’s worth keeping in mind that a spend of a few hundred more dollars opens the door to Intel Core-powered NAS in the TVS-hx74 series or more powerful Xeon triple tiered systems such as the TVS-h1288X. If you want power, but on a budget, it’s a great choice!

SOFTWARE - 8/10

HARDWARE - 8/10

PERFORMANCE - 9/10

PRICE - 8/10

VALUE - 8/10

8.2

PROS

👍🏻Large Storage Potential (Especially in ZFS)
👍🏻Sensible Choice of CPU
👍🏻QTier Tool is VERY Appealing
👍🏻ZFS in QuTS but with a User Friendly GUI
👍🏻Three Tier Storage Opts
👍🏻Support of ECC Memory & 128GB Max
👍🏻Tonnes of Expansion Options
👍🏻8 Camera Licenses with QVR Pro/QTS
👍🏻Well Ventilated Design
👍🏻Supports Latest 22TB and 24TB (soon)

CONS

👎🏻2x SATA SSD Bays Would Hva ebeen Better if U.2
👎🏻Initial 8GB Memory is low for all ZFS services + is not ECC in default/Base Model
👎🏻Software can be a little inconsistent under excessive use
👎🏻Features a steeper learning curve than Synology
👎🏻Early Pricing is a Mixed Bag

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QNAP TS-855X NAS Review – PACKAGING & ACCESSORIES

The retail packaging for the QNAP TS-855X NAS doesn’t stand out in terms of visual appeal, but it certainly does its job. Its dull exterior can be described as ‘functional chic’, focusing more on substance than style. Even so, the packaging is impressively solid, providing a sense of reassurance that the NAS device within is well-protected during transit.

When it comes to the internal protective packaging, it boasts a sturdy and solid construction made of a hard foam structure. This robust internal packaging is designed to effectively cushion the NAS, further enhancing the protective aspects of the packaging and ensuring that the device reaches the user in impeccable condition.

As for the accessories, they include ethernet cables, an external mains cable, screws, m.2 heatsinks, tray keys, an instruction manual, and warranty information. These accessories may not be the most exciting, but they are certainly practical, providing you with all the necessary components to set up and start using your NAS right out of the box.

A noteworthy inclusion is the heatsinks for the M.2 NVMe slots within the QNAP TS-855X NAS. Although it may seem like a small addition, it’s an incredibly useful one. These heatsinks will play a significant role in maintaining optimal operating temperatures for your M.2 NVMe SSDs, which is especially beneficial for intensive workloads.

The overall packaging design strikes a perfect balance between protection and functionality. While the packaging and included accessories might be considered somewhat mundane by some, they include everything necessary for setting up and operating the NAS. This focus on utility over aesthetics makes the unboxing process a smooth and satisfying experience.

QNAP TS-855X NAS Review – Design

The QNAP TS-855X NAS chassis is sizeable, with dimensions of 231.9 × 292.9 × 319.8 mm. Its metallic structure gives it a hefty, robust feel, suggesting that it’s built to last and can handle the rigors of intensive data management.

As for the ventilation system, it’s clear that a lot of thought has been put into its design. There’s abundant ventilation on the front around the trays, a large side vent panel, extensive ventilation on the bottom, and additional ventilation on the rear of the casing around the two main active fans. This comprehensive cooling system ensures efficient thermal management, which is crucial for maintaining the longevity and performance of your drives.

The TS-855X NAS also features an LCD control panel, which provides real-time system information. This includes system temperatures, LAN addresses, and system warnings. Having this level of information readily available at a glance makes for a more user-friendly experience and allows for better system management.

Each empty bay of the TS-855X, which includes six SATA HDD and two SATA SSD bays, comes equipped with a plastic tray that requires no screws to secure the drives. This screwless design makes installing and replacing drives a breeze, adding to the overall user-friendly design.

Each bay features a dedicated LED light that indicates drive access and health. These LED indicators can have their brightness increased or decreased as per your preference. This offers an easy visual cue to help you keep track of drive performance and access.

Moreover, each bay is lockable, offering an added level of security for your drives. This can be particularly useful in shared environments, providing a physical deterrent against unauthorized drive removal.

The TS-855X is quite flexible when it comes to drive configuration. You can operate the system with as few as a single SATA drive, or you can choose to partially or fully populate the bays. This scalability ensures the NAS can adapt to your storage needs as they evolve.

Additionally, you can attach up to two expansion devices from QNAP to the TS-855X. These expansion devices range from 2-bay and 4-bay models to larger 16-bay models and even daisy-chainable rackmounts. This flexibility allows for considerable storage expansion possibilities, ensuring your NAS can grow along with your data requirements.

There is a front-mounted one-touch button USB port available for local backups on the TS-855X. This convenient feature enables straightforward local backups, adding to the overall versatility of the system.

QNAP TS-855X NAS Review – Ports & Connections

In terms of connectivity, the QNAP TS-855X NAS brings a variety of options to the table, even if it feels a bit oriented towards business needs.

It offers a 10GbE copper port, which is directly available and not via a PCIe card. This high-speed network connection allows for rapid data transfer, making it ideal for businesses or power users with demanding data needs.

There are two Gen 3×4 PCIe slots available for adding upgrade cards. These slots can be utilized for various additions, including 10GbE, 25GbE, NVMe Storage Upgrade cards, and more. This provides the user with considerable expansion possibilities, catering to potential future upgrade requirements.

The TS-855X also comes with two 2.5GbE ports, which support SMB Multichannel. With these ports, the system can provide a potential 15GbE of network connectivity on day one, with lots of room for increased bandwidth later on.

Additional connectivity options include two USB 3.2 Gen 1 Ports, which can be used for external storage drives, network adapters, office appliances, UPS’, and the previously mentioned QNAP expansion devices. This wide variety of connectivity options positions the TS-855X as a highly versatile and adaptable NAS solution.

QNAP TS-855X NAS Review – Internal Hardware

At the heart of the QNAP TS-855X NAS is an Intel Atom C5125 8-core processor, with each core operating at a clock speed of 2.8GHz. This CPU is a reasonable and affordable alternative to a Xeon Processor, bringing a solid balance between performance and cost-effectiveness.

This CPU allows the TS-855X to deliver impressive performance, achieving up to 3,500MB/s sequential read and 2,200MB/s sequential write with SATA SSDs and 25GbE network upgrades. These figures demonstrate the power of the TS-855X, which is well-suited for handling demanding tasks such as large file transfers, streaming high-definition content, or running intensive server applications.

The NAS arrives with 8GB of UDIMM Memory that can be upgraded over 4 slots up to a maximum of 128GB. This expanded memory capacity will be particularly beneficial for tasks that require a lot of RAM, such as running virtual machines, managing large scale databases, and handling dedicated flash storage.

The CPU of the TS-855X supports ECC memory. However, to keep the cost of the NAS at an affordable range of $1300-1400, ECC memory is not included by default. This compromise allows QNAP to offer the TS-855X at a more competitive price, while still providing the option for users to upgrade to ECC memory if needed.

Apart from the 6 HDD bays and 2 SSD bays, the QNAP TS-855X NAS also incorporates 2x NVMe SSD Bays inside. This additional storage option introduces an extra level of versatility to the system’s storage configuration, opening up new possibilities for performance enhancement.

These M.2 NVMe Bays are 2280 PCIe Gen 3×4 and allow the TS-855X to function as a three-tier storage system, supporting caching and QTier. This three-tier system enables the NAS to efficiently manage and distribute data across different types of storage media, optimizing performance and storage efficiency. The M.2 NVMe Bays can also be used for storage pools with drives OR for AI upgrade cards like the Google Coral or NPU upgrades. This provides users with even more options for enhancing the capabilities and performance of the TS-855X.

The good news is that unlike Synology and its inclusion of M.2 NVMe SSD slots, the 2280 slots inside the QNAP can be used for more than just read/write caching. The use of SSD caching to provide performance benefits to a slower, but larger and more affordable Hard Drive RAID away are quite well established in the NAS industry, using the SSD space to either write files to the system faster (acting as the primary write area, before moving the data) or increase the speed of accessing commonly requested files on the NAS (making copies of those files onto the SSDs, though largely tiny files are optimized and do not really affect larger block/sequential data). However, though the QNAP TS-855X supports SSD caching on these bays, it also supports their use in QTier. This is similar to caching but in QTier the available HDD and SSDs are combined into a single storage area and it intelligently moves files periodically to the appropriate storage media as it analyzes their access and requests. Finally, if you wish, you can use the NVMe SSD bays for just a fast accessing and performing storage pool and volumes of it’s own. These two bays, plus the main SATA HDD bays, plus adding a PCIe SSD storage card in an available slot means that the TS-855X has enormous storage potential. These m.2 bays can also be used for system upgrades, but these are still quite few in reality and it is only the google TPU m.2 upgrade that increases AI system processes that is recommended in 2023 so far.

Finally, despite the size of the TS-855X NAS, the interior is surprisingly spacious. The clever design allows for excellent airflow within the chassis, contributing to efficient cooling and optimal performance. This thoughtful design ensures that the TS-855X can handle even the most demanding tasks while maintaining a high level of reliability and durability.

]QNAP TS-855X NAS Review – Software & Services

Alongside the hardware of the TS-855X NAS, you also receive the complete software and services package of QNAP QTS (currently in version 5.0). This is a complete operating system. similar in design and presentation to Android OS, it runs hundreds of applications, services and functions, as well as arriving with many mobile and desktop client applications that allow you to interact with the data on your NAS in a much more tailored way. Alongside this, the QNAP QTS software on the TS-855X also includes a few extra SSD tools for anti-wearing on SSDs, better SSD profiling and even options to separate the media into storage, caching or tiered storage where appropriate. The performance and services of QTS have been covered many times on this channel, so reviewing it’s individual performance on the TS-855X NAS is a difficult task, as we have to look at two key things. Is QTS a good software platform and is QTS 5.0 a substantial update on QTS 4.5?

On the first score, I can comfortably say that QNAP NAS software and services have truly come into their own and the balancing act of supplying the end-user with the flexibility to use the system ‘their way’, whilst still keeping it user-friendly is the best it has ever been. Is it perfect, no. In its efforts to make itself customizable in every way possible, QTS develops an inadvertent learning curve that may catch some novice users unaware. Likewise, although QTS 5 has done a lot of work on its presentation of information and notifications, there is still the odd moment of ‘TMI’ when switching between services on the fly. QNAP’s NAS software is still easily one of the most adaptable in the market right now and allows users to have a truly unique storage environment if they choose and although not quite as user-friendly as Synology DSM, it counters this by being fantastically flexibly by comparison (from file/folder structure to 3rd party services support and connectivity). That said, 2020-2021 were a bumpy road for the brand and a series of ransomware attacks were targetted at the brand that was caused by a combination of vulnerabilities in Linux (which practically all NAS and Android software is built upon) but also in how applications in the QNAP platform were allowed to have external access. In previous revisions of QTS, customization and guidance for changing settings on the system was made very easy and open but lacked a lot of the gravitas and significance that these changes ade to the system being highlighted to less experienced users (such as allowing the QNAP to adapt remote ports on your router over UPnP and how the HBS3 program allowed remote access. These omissions, vulnerabilities and communication issues in QTS have seemingly been resolved and QTS 5 seems to be a much tighter system on the whole (as much as anything can be once you open it to the internet). But many users still feel that the brand needs to do more and therefore until QNAP can remove the lingering stories of ransomware and malware over time, this si always going to be an existing sensitive issue for buyers. In order to see the extent of the latest version of QNAP TS 5.0 use the links below to the written review and video below released in late 2021:

FULL Written QNAP QTS 5 Review	FULL Video Review of QNAP QTS 5

Although the full review of QNAP QTS is available in the article and video linked above, let’s discuss the highlights of the platform. First off there are the software and services for managing files and folders on the fly. QTS includes several tools for managing files in your web browser (with full copy, paste, archive, extract, sharing, etc options built-in), as well as smart system/file search functionality.

The security when using your TS-855X NAS (again, a continued area of contention and criticism for QNAP in the past) in terms of customization and alerts have been noticeably improved and upgraded in both their deployment and presentation in QTS. These range from a multi-layered security advisor to control anti-malware scans, anti-virus schedules, firewall monitoring and more. There is also a range of access and security credential tools that are quite far-reaching all built-in. With QNAP having to prove its platform is safe more than most, there is a bit shift positively in this direction in the latest versions of QTS.

Overall storage management, access, mounting and how this factors into backups have also been massively diversified in QTS and along with numerous means to create a very unique storage system (factoring RAID, multi-stage 1-2-3 backups, connecting with cloud drive/objects and how this is presented to the end-users are incredibly deep. It can lead to a situation in which the end-user is a pinch overwhelmed, but you cannot say that QNAP is not providing the tools – they are just almost TOO numerous in their presentation.

The same goes for multimedia handling on the QNAP TS-855X, with a wide range of tools for handing photos, music and video in a tailored GUI to each media type. This is made considerably easier with QNAP’s multimedia console tool that provides a single GUI that can be used to handle all the backend setup of all your individual media apps. QNAP also provides AI photo recognition to allow decades of photos to be searched intelligently for people and subjects to quite an impressively deep degree (not needing internet access to do so, with the AI onboard the system). Then you have support for a wide range of 3rd party multimedia tools such as Plex media server, Emby, Twinky and Kodi (unofficially).

Then you have business tools (small, medium or even enterprise) included that can range from the deployment of multiple virtual machines across many platforms and a dedicated 1st party container deployment tool. One very unique feature of QNAP QTS compared with other NAS brands in their deployment of VMs is that they include 2-3 click download options in their respective applications that allow you to download ready to use VM in Windows 7,8 and 10, as well as a VM market place for more enterprise virtual clients and even a Ubuntu 18/19/20 VM deployment tool that allows you to quickly set up a VM and then access remotely OR use the HDMI+KVM set up locally. The container station tool also has its own pre-built tool repository too.

Finally, for surveillance use, the TS-855X arrives with QVR Pro which allows you to have a business-class surveillance platform hosted on your NAS. This platform has its very own GUI that supports thousands of IP Camera brands, as well as the software arriving with 8 camera licenses with the TS-855X, a multi-camera feed display, intelligent alerts, AI services (hardware appropriate), multiple client tools for mobile/desktop clients, integration of 3rd party system management tools and you can even attach USB cameras to your QNAP NAS and have local cameras fed into the NAS too.

So, software on the QNAP TS-855X is pretty diverse and although the brand has seen its fair share of security complaints in the past, I think that it would be hard for me to ignore the range of NAS hardware configuration, services and tools that are included.  Tests of the QNAP TS-855X on how it performs as a Plex Media Server, host for Virtual Machines and more will be conducted shortly over on NASCompares YouTube channel. I recommend visiting there to learn more. Below is the video review for the QNAP TS-855X NAS

QNAP TS-855X NAS Review – Conclusion & Verdict

I have to say, I am MOSTLY impressed by how much bang for buck is being included in the TS-855X and although it is not the most powerful device in the market (arguably intentionally, as it favours the more affordable Atom over a xeon), it is a sensible workhorse of a NAS. On the positive side, the QNAP TS-855X NAS comes with numerous strong selling points. The device offers large storage potential, especially with the ZFS file system, making it a powerhouse for data management. The choice of CPU is also sensible, providing a balance between performance and cost-effectiveness. The inclusion of the QTier tool is particularly appealing, adding a layer of efficiency to the storage management. Another big plus is the user-friendly GUI for ZFS in QuTS, making it accessible for users with varying levels of technical expertise. The three-tier storage options and support of ECC memory with a maximum of 128GB further enhance the device’s versatility and potential. Moreover, the TS-855X provides a wealth of expansion options and comes with 8 camera licenses with QVR Pro/QTS. The well-ventilated design contributes to thermal efficiency, ensuring optimal performance, while its support for the latest 22TB and soon-to-be-released 24TB drives future-proofs your investment.

However, the TS-855X is not without its drawbacks. While the two SATA SSD bays provide extra storage options, they would have been better if they were U.2 slots, which offer faster speeds. Although the device supports ECC memory, the initial 8GB memory in the base model is non-ECC, which might not be optimal for all ZFS services. The memory capacity might also be somewhat low for users with intensive data needs. Furthermore, the software can sometimes be inconsistent under heavy use, and it has a steeper learning curve compared to competitors like Synology. Finally, the pricing structure for the TS-855X is a mixed bag. While some users may find the cost reasonable given its features, others might feel it’s a bit steep for what it offers. Therefore, while the QNAP TS-855X NAS offers a plethora of attractive features and strong performance, it’s worth keeping in mind that a spend of a few hundred more dollars opens the door to Intel Core-powered NAS in the TVS-hx74 series or more powerful Xeon triple tiered systems such as the TVS-h1288X. If you want power, but on a budget, it’s a great choice!

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