QNAP TS-h973AX-32G 9-Bay QuTS Hero NAS with 10GbE/2.5GbE Connectivity

So wanted to take a bit on testing t his Nas out and giving my honest review.I have all 5 bays filled with Seagate Ironwold pro 18tb 7200RPM 256MB Cache NAS drives and then 2 SSD 512GB in lower 2 bays and then 2x 2TB NVME Samsung 980 pro in U.2 QDA-UMP housings.On the 5x 18tb drives I have several ZFS directories setup for different functions, though the transfer rate on these drives tens to top out around 1.09 ~ 1.12 GB/sec from my main pc.On the other drives the U.2 its always topped out at 1.12GB/sec and around 950~980MB/sec on the SSD's.The transfer speed on this nas is amazing to say the least I had the TVS-951X with 10G network and the same drives and only would get around 400MB/sec no matter what drives I had it going to. I contacted Qnap various times on this device and they would try a few things and nothing ever would fix the horrific transfer speeds, they deemed it defective, though the replacement unit suffered exactly the same fate which told me it was a limitation of the device not any one thing.Though after testing a friends TS-H973AX and getting full 10Gbit speed on it, I bought one of these and it works beautifully.The OS on boot tends to be a bit slower then other Qnaps I have though its not really a metric you should be worried about.This device supports ECC memory and running ZFS it is highly recommended, I upgraded to 32GB of ECC memory on this device and it worked right away no fiddling with it or having the ram not work at all which I had experienced on other Qnap devices.The features of this device are extensive, from surveillance software to hosting and docker it does what you need it to do for sure.I run plex on the device and it is flawless and fast playing 4k HEVC 10bit HDR and Dolby Atmos audio with out a hiccup. It transcodes if needed like a beast, the cpu is more then capable of on the fly transcoding to lower resolutions if need be.It came with Qnaps QTS Hero 4.3 which now had 5.0 out and I would highly recommend does fix a lot of quirky things in the OS.Only down side I would say is that the security options for IP access is still lacking support, there is only allow all ips in list or deny, no white list no options for a white list.I get attempts left and right from people trying to log into my nas from the internet, though I use this as a storage device for projects and stuff when I'm out and about, I dont feel like paying for a service to store stuff online when I have plenty of storage at home.If Qnap would work on the security options and give us an option to white list IP addresses it would go just that extra step in protecting peoples nas's that really do require it to be online.All in all its a purchase I dont regret, it works great, speed is amazing and its built like it should, just needs a few loving updates to security options.

Now that I've had a few days with the unit I can say that it meets my requirements but only because I've added a full boat of hardware on top. My setup is fully stocked costing a bit more than I expected. I used serverpartsdeals to get 5 18tb ultrastar refurbs on amazon for 1400$ I then purchased 2x U.2 Dell emc high durability NAND pcie gen3x4 ssds' and a pair of Micron 5300's all 4 of which have high durability for enterprise level work. The Mircon sata ssds' were brand new and strangely the only new drives in the entire setup. The device was updated and connected to my 10gig unifi aggregation switch. The unit was able to onboard 48tb of data in under 24 hours, quite the feat. Write and read speeds were heavily improved adding dual 1.6tb u.2's in as flash cache raid, and setup was a breeze, though I couldn't really tweak much in the way of zil cache modes and raid settings for these 2 ssd's, and there's an option requiring more than 2 nvme ssds's to provide what they seem to call the "best" flash to cache option, which I believe would require converting these 2 u.2's into 4x nvme m.2's via adapters. I'm confident the refurbs I got will be solid, and u.2 provides power fail protection natively so I'm in for a penny on it.Overall this cost me about 800 less than building a capable off the rack nas system chassis psu mainboard ram cpu etc., and the fact that it's somewhat modular, providing pcie slot upgrade options and can take double the ram and use ECC modules makes me feel more comfortable with the spend.

Set this up for the company I work for and it gets the job done perfectly for a network drive and restricting access to folder.

**UPDATE 3**The system was still running FAR slower than it should for a device of this hardware potential. After some intense investigation, I discovered that LUKS encryption is bugged in the QNAP QuTS Hero kernel, causing all operations on encrypted disks (and interacting with those disks) to be far slower than expected. This was confirmed when running cryptsetup benchmark (the Linux utility used to test a system's encryption/decryption speed) on the NAS directly, then once again on a VM running on the same NAS. The VM used a different kernel, and encryption/decryption operations were many times faster. Lowering to two stars until this is addressed, but QNAP support is aware and have escalated this to their R&D.QNAP support is pretty good - they're able to communicate with people who have very low technical ability and very high technical ability.**UPDATE 2**After re-pasting the CPU and cleaning/re-seating the cable/card to the drive cage from the motherboard, I updated to the latest QuTS Hero and reinitialized the NAS with the storage hard drives removed and only the OS SSDs installed. Since then, everything is going very well and the fan speed is quiet. I may have just gotten a bad one off the line. Probably my own bad luck. It's working quiet well now.**UPDATE**In my quest to figure out what the heck is going wrong on it, I decided to look at the anemic thermal solution on the CPU. It's a bit weak and has no direct fan on it, but there is a fan header there so adding a little 20mm fan works wonders. The worst part was the thermal paste. Look at the picture. They only pasted 2/3 of the CPU. No wonder I was having problems.Even still: Days later and indexing/thumbnailing isn't done still. Original review below:I got it right when their 5.0 OS release came out and they introduced SO MANY bugs.1: Fan curve is terrible. It's going to max when the CPU is 60C. It is REALLY LOUD. Support says it's a known bug and will be fixed in the next release, and downgrade to fix it. It didn't fix. Setting it to a manual fan curve causes the system to believe it is overheating even when it is at 66C.2: Thumbnail generation and indexing is horribly slow. Still not done after >2 weeks.3: Their ZFS implementation is wholly trash. ZFS ARC is taking over 50% memory and won't release it and kills SERVICES instead of lowering ARC size and there's nowhere to set a lower ARC limit. Upgrading to 32GB RAM had the SAME problem. **UPDATE** it's now possible to set an ARC limit from 40-70 percent but no higher or lower. Set to 40% after a 64GB RAM upgrade and it STILL killed a bunch of services overnight for no known reason.4: You need to know what you're getting itno with ZFS. For example: if you build a ZFS pool with 4 drives, you cannot add a fifth drive for more capacity. It just CAN'T happen.5: Don't even think of using ZFS deduplication or compression and still run services. This system doesn't have enough RAM.6: The hardware design is horrible for cooling. The fan pulls air through the drives, but doesn't have a direct airflow over the CPU heatsink.Also, my unit was missing a rubber foot. You'd expect more for the price. I purchased and attached my own set.I will come back and edit this review if I can work through more of this.