QNAP TS-563 NAS Review

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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.

Chris Ramseyer
Chris Ramseyer is a Contributing Editor for Tom's Hardware US. He tests and reviews consumer storage.
  • tridon
    Bought a QNAP just over a month ago. Didn't find one sporting hardware from AMD, and I didn't think it would come anytime soon. Good to see that it actually performs well and isn't just the good old "cheap and slow AMD stuff". Will still be a while before I buy a new NAS though, sorry AMD. I do try to support you from time to time.
    Reply
  • gggplaya
    With such a powerful SOC, can it do Movie transcoding to DLNA?? So i can easily watch things on my TV via wifi?
    Reply
  • toadhammer
    Maybe I missed it, but I don't see test setup info on how you are fairly comparing 4-bay and 5-bay devices? For instance, QNAPs own 453 vs 563.
    Reply
  • ozicom
    If just a memory is different between $542 to $709 seems so much difference. There should be some other features missing on the cheap one.
    Reply
  • CRamseyer
    Four, five and six bay NAS are all tested in RAID 5 and with a single gigabit connection back to the network. Those systems are all grouped together and it's easy to spot overlap in the pricing as well.

    The only difference is the memory.
    Reply
  • ozicom
    I think 8GB model comes with more camera license or different RAID configurations or something else. Because 2x4GB SO-DIMM memory doesn't make that much difference.
    Reply
  • zodiacfml
    I thought we would see power consumption comparisons, or did I just missed it?
    Reply
  • getochkn
    If these things always use cheap SOC's and opensource software, why are they are always so much more expensive than a PC I could build that would many times faster for less. I would love a NAS, but until they are more reasonable priced, I will stick with cheaper PC's that can do more and are faster. $700 will buy you a monster CPU, way more RAM than 8GB, etc. Ya, no hot swap case, but whatever. How often do you have to swap out dead drives.
    Reply
  • CRamseyer
    So what you are asking for is a free operating system, software plugins, optimizations, fast / redundant file systems and so on for little to no cost?

    They are not just about the hardware and support.
    Reply
  • Niva
    He has a point though. The price is high, and for people who like to tinker with old machines/cases they can build a NAS/server for their own office on the cheap that could be significantly more powerful from leftover components. These things are all running some variant of linux anyways, so don't even get us started on that.
    Reply