Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I have had the TS-453A for almost a week now. I separately ordered two of Kingston Technology 4GB 1600MHz DDR3L PC3-12800 1.35V Non-ECC CL11 SODIMM Intel Laptop Memory KVR16LS11/4 to upgrade to 8GB, saving a hundred dollars than buying the 8GB version. Before this NAS I had been using a 3TB WD MyBook Live but needed more performance and redundancy as my personal data is growing. I am using the TS-453A with 2x 6TB WD Red drives in Raid 1. In the near future I will be adding another 2x 6TB drives and convert to RAID 10. So far the unit has exceeded my expectations and I am very happy with read/write performance, especially with multiple simultaneous connections. I have been able to write data to the NAS at consistent ~30-35 megaBYTES/second using 802.11n 5GHz WiFi from a MacBook Pro (router is ASUS RT-N66u). The WD MyBook Live topped out at 10-12MBps on a good day. I have not tested using a Gigabit wired connection, yet. This unit has plenty of horsepower: no noticeable degradation in performance with both of our MacBook Pros doing full TimeMachine backups, while writing hundreds of gigabytes of data simultaneously. I am primarily using this NAS for data storage, backup and remote access to my personal data - and NOT for streaming media to my Smart TV since I use AppleTV+MacBook Pro for that. However, the QTS 4.2 operating system has plenty of features if you want to turn it into a media server, with support for iTunes, DLNA, Twonky etc. My SmartTV supports DLNA so I intend to test the DLNA streaming from NAS directly to TV at some point. The App Center has plenty of apps to choose from, to further enhance the capabilities. I am using CrashPlan app on the QNAP to backup data on the NAS to the cloud. I wasted a whole day researching/troubleshooting an issue where launching any app (including CrashPlan) that opens its configuration menu in a webpage would give a "403 Forbidden: You don't have permission to access / on this server." message. See my comment on this review for solution. I have since used their QManager, QFile and QVideo mobile apps on iOS and they work very well. I can remotely access all my data and manage/monitor the unit from any web broswer or my iPhone. Love it! The QFile app can play your videos stored on the NAS on your iPhone/iPad even if the file format is not natively supported by iOS. QTS 4.2 gives me excellent control over sharing data with other family members. For example, QTS automatically creates a /home folder for each user account. When a user connects to the NAS using their credentials, QTS automatically maps them to the /home share tied to their user account. Files in each user's /home folder are private. Advanced File Permissions allow you to control access to subfolders, so you can lock a subfolder even if the user has access to its parent folder. You can also set disk space quotas for each user. Finally, a note about QNAP customer service. I ordered the item from Amazon that is sold directly by QNAP and is not eligible for Prime delivery (Amazon was out of stock at the time). A UPS shipping label was generated the very next day but the item wasn't picked up by UPS for 3 business days. Found out that QNAP had a miscommunication with their warehouse and the unit was out of stock. They got it in on the fourth business day and upgraded shipping method to Next-Day Air at no cost to me and met their shipping deadline. Well done QNAP. I also contacted their technical support regarding the web server issue mentioned above. I submitted a ticket on the weekend and a representative contacted me Monday. I had already solved the issue myself by then, but nonetheless he was willing to do a screen sharing troubleshooting session with me. Well done again! A great product can still leave a bad experience when the support behind it is poor or non-existing, so keep it up QNAP. A word of caution: This product is aimed at SMBs and advanced home users. While the QTS 4.2 operating system makes it simple to configure most features, you still need to have at least average knowledge of networking (router configuration, port forwarding, port-channels/link aggregation, static IP addresses etc.) to take full advantage of features such as remote access, VPN server/client etc. If you have experience with Linux command line then you are golden but that is definitely not a requirement. Google is your friend. Please comment if you have questions and I will do my best to answer.