QNAP TVS-h874 Review: A High-Performance NAS for SMBs

Storage

QNAP TVS-h874

Pros

  • Strong Performance: The NAS or IP SAN provided by the Unification of Intel Core i5 processors and improvements in QuTS hero offers stunning performance.
  • Scalability: It supports up to eight drives, with dual M.2 NVMe slots and PCI-E expansion on the TVS-h874, thus it can grow with your business instantly.
  • Advanced Data Security: Triple parity RAID, WORM policies, and end-to-end checksums ensure the highest level of protection.
  • Resource RIch Application Stack: QNAP app library offers rich solutions to back up, sync files, handle media, and secure surveillance.

Cons

  • Expensive: The TVS-h874 is priced at a premium and may be too pricey for small businesses or home use.
  • More Than Needed: For those who do not need enterprise-class features, the TVS-h874 would be more than what is needed by businesses or individuals.
TVS-h874 Review

QNAP has enjoyed market leadership over a period of years, bringing solutions with NAS to fit virtually any form of user, ranging from the home consumer and up through enterprise organizations. Enterprise-class features and performance levels, on the other hand, are what the QNAP TVS-h874 brings to SMBs.

This 8-bay NAS, powered by the mighty QuTS hero operating system and supported by the Intel 12th-generation Core i5 processor, offers you impressive storage capacity, high-speed data transfer, and excellent data protection mechanisms. But is this high-end NAS worth its premium pricing? In this in-depth review, we will discuss every detail of the QNAP TVS-h874 so that you could decide whether it’s just what your business needs or if you need something else.

qnap tvsh874 review

QNAP TVS-h874 Introduction

QNAP’s TVS-h874 is part of the TVS-hx74 lineup, and has been making waves in the storage world with its enterprise-class features and SMB-friendly design. If you need to store large files, manage, and protect them efficiently, this is one of the devices that comes at a lot of high-end capabilities compared to many considerably pricier solutions. Built with a focus on performance, scalability, and robust data protection, the TVS-h874 can withstand the most demanding workloads: file sharing, virtualization, or even the simplest data backups.

But good specs and features come at a cost. Is the QNAP TVS-h874 worth your business’s investment? Breaking down some of the most important aspects that make this NAS stand out from the crowded market.

Overview of Key Features

The QNAP TVS-h874 is chock-full of features that separate it from other NAS solutions. Some of the biggest components that give an overview of this device include:

  • Intel Core i5-12400 Processor: a 2.5GHz, 6-core processor for streamlined data processing and smooth multitasking
  • 32GB DDR4 Memory (expandable to 64GB): ample memory to support numerous virtual machines, heavy file transfers, and more computing intensive applications.
  • 8 Hot-Swappable Drive Bays: Allows 3.5-inch or 2.5-inch drives in the bays, giving you flexibility in choosing storage configurations.
  • 2 Internal M.2 NVMe PCI-E Gen4 Slots : Can be used for SSD caching, or as part of a high-performance storage pool.
  • Dual 2.5GbE Ports: Supports fast data transfer and seamless network integration, able to upgrade to 10GbE or 25GbE via PCI-E Gen4 slots.
  • QuTS Hero Operating System: a ZFS-based OS that provides advanced inline deduplication, compression, and unlimited snapshots in order to enhance data integrity and protection.
  • 4K Video Output via HDMI 1.4b: Intel’s UHD Graphics 730 enables the TVS-h874 to support 4K video at 30Hz, which makes it ideal for multimedia use cases.

All these features make for a very potent and flexible storage solution, capable of much more than just a simple file server.

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Hardware Specs: A Real-World Check of Performance

The beating heart of the TVS-h874 is Intel’s 12th generation Core i5-12400 processor with a resulting clock speed of 2.5GHz across six performance cores: making this NAS extra perfect to get on with something else in the background. Whether you use it to run many virtual machines, administer databases, or stream highresolution video, the Core i5-12400 ensures everything runs without a hitch.

The Synology DiskStation DS720+ comes with a standard configuration of 32GB of DDR4 memory, which is certainly more than enough for most SMB tasks, but businesses that need to push the NAS to its limits can expand the memory up to 64GB. This way, even the most resource-intensive applications that have heavy-duty virtualization and real-time analytics can function perfectly.

Inside the storage, TVS-h874 holds eight front-facing drive bays. Large form factors like 3.5 inches and small form factors such as 2.5 inches are supported for easy choosing of media, and it hosts your high-capacity hard drives for bulk storage or high-speed solid-state drives as needed.

The two M.2 NVMe PCI-E Gen4 slots offer an opportunity at even better performance. You can have SSDs installed here for caching purposes, which would improve read and write speeds by holding commonly accessed data within the faster SSD cache.

Understanding QuTS Hero: ZFS-Based Storage for SMBs

QNAP TVS-h874 is an operating system built with QuTS hero, which is built on the foundation of the ZFS, or Zettabyte File System architecture. While users who don’t know what ZFS is, it has advanced features in data protection and management. It’s being widely used in enterprise due to the assurance it provides in terms of integrity in the data and also optimizes the performance of storage media.

Key Benefits of QuTS Hero

  • Checksums Across Ends: All the data written to the storage is checked using checksums, in which it catches corrupt data automatically and corrects it.
  • Inline Deduplication and Compression: Inline deduplication and compression features eradicate duplicate data, while compressing file in real-time, compressing files and reducing their usage of space in the storage. You are storing millions of data; QuTS hero ensures that your storage is used with maximum efficiency.
  • Unlimited Snapshots: Snapshots are the point-in-time copies of your data, which you may use for backups or revert files to an earlier state. QuTS hero supports an infinite number of snapshots, something important to a business entity that needs reliable backup options.

All these features make QuTS hero the excellent choice for businesses that look forward to securing data and efficiency. The system is accompanied by an easy-to-use interface that makes storage pools creation, the procedure of setting up snapshots, and holding information on the system’s health easy.

Storage Expansion and Connectivity Options

Another feature of the TVS-h874 is its scalability. Most NAS solutions are not scalable enough. From this point of view, the TVS-h874 helps you grow with your business.

It comes with eight hot-swappable drive bays, so you are always ready to replace or add drives in your system, without having to shut down the system. For businesses that require further storage expansion, QNAP provides JBOD-enclosures that may be connected to increase storage.

Apart from the drive bays, it has two PCI-E Gen4 slots as well. High-speed NVMe SSDs, network adapters, and additional storage cards can be mounted upon them. For instance, you may want faster networking at your business; the NAS can support 10GbE or even 25GbE networking by adding the appropriate adapter.

This will make the TVS-h874 meet the needs of your business on the go; from expanding more storage for the business to improvements to data transfer rates or adding new features with expansion via the PCI-E slots.

Setup and Deployment: Simple but Powerful

The QNAP TVS-h874 has surprisingly been quite easy to set up for all the advanced and sophisticated characteristics it displays. This system comes pre-installed with a web-based management console and will walk you step by step through the process.

QuTS hero will be installed by the setup wizard when you boot up the device. You will also be walked through configuration of your storage pool through the wizard, selecting your drives and RAID level. To test we used four 14TB WD Red Plus NAS drives in a RAID5 configuration, optimizing performance with redundancy.

For businesses which take data protection seriously there are more options, to set up RAID6 or RAID10/ even triple mirroring, which is maximally redundant in terms of the data copying, but demands at least three drivers for writing, at the end keeping three copies of your data.

Once a storage pool is created, the creation and management of network shares and snapshots as well as making backups is pretty straightforward through the intuitive web console. NAS technology thus becomes very easy to deploy even for novices using the system for the first time due to easy wizards and clear step-by-step instructions.

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Advanced Data Protection Features

Data protection is one of the major selling points for QNAP TVS-h874, and QuTS hero’s architecture based on ZFS has greatly played into this. ZFS protects your data with some feature-rich and advanced technologies that prevent data corruption, ensure your files are safe, and accessible.

Actually, one of the fundamental features set by ZFS is end-to-end checksum. Once data is written into a storage, it immediately checks the integrity of those data. Thus, if any corruption in data is found by the storage, correction is done automatically by ZFS, assuring that none of your files are either lost or corrupted.

On top of checksums, QuTS hero offers triple parity RAID and triple mirroring. Triple parity RAID provides extreme redundancy, allowing up to three drives to fail without actually losing data while triple mirroring keeps copies of data across multiple disks, so you will be safe even during multiple failures on the hardware front.

Furthermore, the NAS supports WORM (Write Once, Read Many) policies that never allow any data being written over or deleted once it has been written. It is useful for businesses with regulatory requirements that are based on the retention and integrity of data.

Performance Benchmarks: Results from Real-World Testing

Hardware specifications and features do count, of course-but what really matters is real-world performance. Benchmarks of QNAP TVS-h874 were taken along with synthetic tests using Iometer and file transfers across the network.

Sequential Read/Write Performance

We hooked it up to a Dell PowerEdge T640 server running Windows Server 2019, connected them over 10GbE. In Iometer, we got sequential read and write speeds of 9.2Gbps with this NAS – close to the maximum throughput of a 10GbE connection. Of course, the QuTS hero OS and the Core i5 processor are the efficiencies allowing this.

Performance for Random Reads/Write

The TVS-h874 also proved itself to be quite robust with random read and write operations, simulating more erratic workloads. We measured 9.2 Gbps of random read/write speeds, proving, therefore, that the NAS has no problem in handling either large sequential transfers of files or smaller, random file-access patterns.

Real-world file transfers

In real-world file transfers, the TVS-h874 never failed to amaze. We transferto a 25GB test file between the NAS and the server with an average read speed of 9Gbps and an average write speed of 8.7Gbps. Even if we copied the file to an encrypted share, we recorded speeds of 8.3Gbps, with CPU utilization staying below 10%, so both hardware and software are really efficient.

IP SAN and Virtualization Performance

The QNAP TVS-h874 is much more than a NAS; it’s also an IP SAN and virtualization-friendly. Businesses can create virtual drives, utilizing iSCSI, and have servers see this as local storage-perfect for environments requiring high-speed, low-latency storage.

In our tests, we set up a 1TB iSCSI target on the TVS-h874. We then connected it to the Dell server via a 10GbE connection. Their iSCSI performance was outstanding, mostly due to sequential and random read/write speeds that constantly would hit 9.2-9.3Gbps.

While sporting two 10GbE connections, coupled with MPIO (Multipath I/O) for MPIO load balancing across a couple of paths, it always scaled to near-linear increases in load. Sequential read rates topped out at 18.1Gbps, while writes stabilized at 17.6Gbps. As one can expect from this level of performance, the TVS-h874 is an excellent choice for enterprises looking for speed and reliability in virtualization platforms like VMware or Hyper-V.

Multimedia Capabilities: Beyond Just Storage

While its main focus is on enterprise-class storage, the QNAP TVS-h874 still comes with multimedia capabilities, making it a fantastic tool for businesses that handle large media files – video production houses or marketing agencies, for example.

The NAS sports Intel’s UHD Graphics 730, so it can play 4K video out of the HDMI 1.4b port. It’s a good answer for companies looking to store, edit, and stream high-resolution video content. Its ability to output video straight from the NAS makes this tool useful for video walls, digital signage, and applications with a lot of media.

The TVS-h874 by QNAP also features an associated group of multimedia apps, among which Plex and Cinema28 from QNAP can be installed to pretty easily manage and stream multimedia content.

App Ecosystem and More Added Functionality

QNAP’s app ecosystem is another area that the TVS-h874 stands out at. The QuTS hero OS supports the same app library as QTS meaning you can access numerous apps ranging from tools to utilities for enhancing functionality on the NAS.

Some of the most useful apps include:

  • Hybrid Backup Sync (HBS) 3: A comprehensive solution for creating backups including multi-cloud backup and data synchronization across different platforms.
  • Qsync Central: A cloud-based file synchronization tool, ensuring your files are the latest and up-to-date everywhere.
  • Hyper Data Protector: It specifically targets backup purposes for virtual machines running within VMware and Hyper-V environments.
  • Surveillance Station: Full-featured surveillance solution that allows you to connect IP cameras to the NAS and use it as a security system centralized hub.

But these apps turn TVS-h874 from a simple storage device into many things because it becomes multi-functional, ready to take up all the tasks of data and information management, from data backup and surveillance to media management.

Price vs. Performance: Worth the Value?

Pricing is probably the top concern for anyone considering SMB users who might be interested in the QNAP TVS-h874, as this NAS isn’t cheap, featuring all the premium hardware and enterprise-class features. Considering the price value of its performance, scaling, and data protection, though, clearly places the value offered by the TVS-h874 well within an investment that would pay off for demanding storage needs.

Because features of QuTS hero, such as inline deduplication, unlimited snapshots, and triple parity RAID, are easily found in much more expensive enterprise storage solutions, the TVS-h874 offers a lot of bang for the buck for businesses that require those features but which cannot quite stretch to a full SAN or enterprise storage array on budget.

Conclusion: Who Should Buy the TVS-h874?

This QNAP TVS-h874 holds as a premium NAS solution with enterprise-class features. It would be well-suited for most SMBs and bigger organizations that need their storage performance to be high. Advanced data protection, scalability, and excellent real-world performance that includes both individual and business-oriented techniques make it an excellent option for businesses dealing with large files or which require robust backup solutions.

Although perhaps too pricey for smaller businesses or home owners, the money is well spent for anybody who needs high-level performance, outstanding data safety, and expansion options. In this regard, the TVS-h874 with its many enterprise-class features and newest advanced software by QuTS hero is a future-proof solution for SMBs that wish to upgrade to high-performance NAS.

And the main focus of the TVS-h874 is the business, however. I, as user, with a lot of reviews, pictures, family pictures and lots and lots more of data.. I surely can fill in the storage bays with huge disks and fill them to the top as well. So in the end it’s not just for the business, but also for users with a huge wallet.. because, cheap.. that’s not one of the characters of this amazing NAS. Being fast, huge (in all sorts) and good… that’s fitting the description.

I am giving the QNAP TVS-h874 4 out of 5 stars. It deserves it!

 

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