Features at a glance:
The modern home NAS solution has evolved over the last
couple of years into something rather extraordinary. No
longer are they simply networked boxes housing a hard
drive and serving your collection of media; there’s
considerably more that the home and small office user
demands from their networked storage solution.
QNAP has therefore pulled out all the stops and is now
offering a complete package in the form of the TS-251+.
This is an extremely high performance and high capacity
networked storage solution that takes the traditional
operation of the NAS device and turns it on its head.
Inside this two bay NAS you can find a quad core Intel
Celeron CPU at 2.42GHz and 2GB of DDR3L RAM,
expandable up to 8GB, along with 512MB of flash memory.
You can fit two 3.5”, or two 2.5” SATA drives in the hot swap
cradles that slide into the unit and lock into position.
The rear of the TS-251+ features ports for HDMI, a pair for
Gigabit Ethernet, two USB 2.0s as well as a single one of
USB 3.0 spec; there’s also a power input and a pin-hole
reset. The front contains a further single USB 3.0 port, the
power button, one touch copy button, a strip of LED
indicators and of course the two drive bays.
Driving all this is a customised embedded Linux operating
system called QTS 4.2.3, whereby you can configure the
TS-251+ and set up the RAID levels for the inserted drives.
The UI is large, colourful and extremely easy to use; and
offers you the ability to tweak the NAS unit to your
particular specification or to delve deeper into its inner
workings for a more advanced level of configuration.The services the TS-251+ offer via the NAS Management
facility include the usual DLNA server but with the added
ability to hardware transcode video in real time up to five
different devices simultaneously. The myQNAPcloud
service will allow you to access your NAS contents
remotely, creating your own personal cloud storage
solution. It’s very easy to use, following a wizard that
will test the connection between your router and the
outside world.In addition to all that, there’s also a VPN service, MySQL
server, network based surveillance station and server, and
many more services via the QNAP App Centre. The
Virtualisation Station is particularly good, giving you
access to network wide virtual operating systems.The installation of the TS-251+ is quick and easy too.
Everything is taken care of via the QTS interface and walks
you through the process without any incoherent technical
jargon. Priced at roughly £250 it’s a little more expensive
than Synology’s offering but like the DS216Play it’s worth
the cost.CPU Quad-Core Intel® Celeron® 2.0GHz (burst up to 2.42GHz)System Memory TS-251+-2G: 2GB DDR3L RAM (1 x 2GB)
TS-251+-8G: 8GB DDR3L RAM (2 x 4GB)
Expandable up to 8GBDrive Bays 2
USB 2.0 Port 2USB 3.0 Port 2
Dimensions 169 x 102 x 219 mmWeight 1.28KG
WebAccess YesDLNA™ Media Server Yes
NovaBACKUP Buffalo Edition YesBitTorrent™ Yes
Apple Time Machine® YesCCContes nludSrucode 59QNAP TS-251+