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A Closer Look
The Turbo NAS TS-563 ships in a brown box with a label that mentions some of the system's features. Again, the accessory package includes a quick-start guide, screws for mounting 2.5- and 3.5-inch drives, two Ethernet cords and a power cord.
As a pedestal NAS, the system can sit quietly on a shelf, file cabinet or right on your desk. Its small footprint doesn't consume much space, and that large AMD sticker can be removed, too.
QNAP arms its platform with an assortment of status LEDs and a large display that come in useful for setting the system up without the aid of additional devices.
The front USB 3.0 port features one-touch copy functionality that lets you plug in a portable storage device and either charge it or send its saved data to a reserved location on the NAS.
Bundled drive sleds support 3.5- and 2.5-inch devices. Air passes through the sleds to keep your disks cool. Sensors inside the system monitor drive temperatures and affect the fan speed to strike a balance between thermal readings and acoustics. The sleds also feature two LEDs each, one to indicates that a drive is present and the other to visualize activity.
Additional LEDs convey system status. Green is good and red lets you know there's a problem. USB and network activity are also displayed through LEDs.
The system pulls fresh air in through the component side to cool the SoC, memory and add-in components. The front face is made from plastic, while everything else is metal.
Almost all of the I/O is found around back. A large, 120mm fan exhausts air from the TS-563 to keep the electronics inside cool. A smaller fan up top is dedicated to cooling the power supply. Nevertheless, the system operates quietly (at least with our Western Digital Red and Seagate NAS hard drives installed).
The TS-563 doesn't output high-definition audio or video directly. DLNA and other software features do push multimedia files from the NAS to your connected devices through four USB 3.0 ports or two GbE ports on the back, though.
