QNAP TS-664-8G-US 6 Bay High-Performance Desktop NAS with Intel Celeron Quad-core Processor, M.2 PCIe Slots and Dual 2.5GbE (2.5G/1G/100M) Network Connectivity (Diskless)

This unit is perfect for my digital storage. 6 bays for HDD and two bays for SSDs. 2.5gbps network adapters make it fast across my home network. Running qnap container station allows for numerous network utilities such as pihole to keep my home network free of ads. Make sure to have it hooked up to a UPS to protect it from any spikes/outage in the power. This will help protect the device and the data.

GOOD

While the official site says that memory in TS-664-8G-US is not upgradable, this model arrived with one of the two memory slots populated with 8GB stick and a QC sticker over it. I plugged another 8GB stick into the free slot and it happily accepted that. Shows 16GB total now. This is an excellent NAS for money. I have both M.2 NVME slots populated as well as QNAP PCIe card with 2 x 2TB M.2 SATA drives. That is besides the 6 HD drives in the usual slots. Plenty of disk space. Do not expect this to be a powerful container or VM host, although 16GB of memory should get you part way there. But it is a great storage device. That is exactly what I needed. It runs quietly. In fact, I am using WD 5400 rpm drives to make it as quiet as possible. That is enough speed for a multimedia center and a host for backups.

I have been researching for weeks to make certain this one in fact has two memory slots in the machine. To my surprise, they used one piece of 8G memory in one of the slots. I confirmed with QNAP that only older model had memory soldered on.

I've owned the ts-464-8g-us (4 bay) and the ts-664-8g-us (6 bay). They are both amazing products. Since 2024, you can upgrade the ram in both. It's less than $20 for a 2nd 8gig DIMM and anyone can install it. You can also add an NVME 256gb cache for about $20. This is a big boost to those who have large Plex servers for instance, as you can place your metadata there and zoom! Do you use/pay for DropBox? Well you can do everything that DropBox does with QSync! And it's included for free. Setup of the qnap is, "So easy a caveman can do it!" I upgraded from a 464 to a 664 because I needed more than 4 drive bays to setup my raid 6 array. The transfer and upgrade took no more than 10 minutes! Just boot up the 664 and ensure it has the same firmware version as the 464. Then power both off and transfer the Ram, NVME SSD, and disks (in the same drivebay order 1,2,3,4). Then power on, done! I highly recommend these Qnap NAS for Plex as they can transcode very well on the fly (or just encode x265 and no more transcoding). Get one now!

This is my first NAS system. As a content creator, this is next level connectivity. I don’t think I could ever go without something like this. I bought this brand on a recommendation because it was “user friendly”… however that’s absolutely not how I would describe it. There are endless proprietary apps that come with this. Many of them are required to do much of anything. The beginning setup is as daunting as prepping for the SATs. And I’m pretty tech savvy. I had to have 2 different people who had some schooling in computers and tech help me with this. Even for them… the proprietary apps took a lot of research to understand. I would not have been able to set this up without help. Even still… I’m still not fully comfortable with how everything works or how to improve if I wanted to. It should replace my cloud storage but I still have both just in case after some frustrating moments. With that said… the amount that you can do with this is pretty wild. An awesome option but not for the faint of heart

To note I've been using home NAS solutions since back in 2002. My 1st NAS (still running) was a Netgear Readynas (4 2TB drives = 6TB RAID5). This was the only NAS that had ever failed me (about 5 years old (I lost a controller card and was unable to salvage my RAID 5). I needed more space and purchased a Synology around 2006 (4 4TB drives for 12TB RAID5). These 2 were enough until around 2020 when I bought a TerraMaster (apparently the new price leader 5 8GB drives for a 32TB RAID5) and my 1st NAS that supported Plex. I've been expanding my digital media library rapidly due to getting a high end entertainment system supporting DTX pro, Dolby True HD, basically all lossless content. This had me maxing out all 3 of my NAS's and I finally decided to get a 4th this year (2024). My primary use is to run a PLEX server with over 1000 movies, 5000 TV shows and growing fast. I attempted to get another Terramaster (to note for same specs as QNAP the Terramaster was $140 less) . I apparently got a bad one and after over a week of trying to set it up I ended up with a brick (restoring factory defaults destroyed it somehow. Having had some issues with my 2020 terramaster, and now with a DOA, I decided to check out the competition. The main options were a 5 bay Synology, 6 bay Asustor, and this QNAP. The QNAP was the 2nd best price and I really wanted to have a 6 bay as I had already purchased 6 14 TB drives. My experience with QNAP has been stellar so far. It has much better app compatibility than Terramaster. The hardware I'm running (6 14 TB drives for 70TB RAID5, 1 TB M.2 SSD for caching, 16TB memory, and a quad core processor make this by far the most powerful NAS I've ever had (which can be seen in the very fast speeds I've observed since) I was able to get this NAS built (added 6 drives, created RAID5, synched the drive, added M2 SSD (1TB) setup for caching, added 8 GB memory to max out that as well. The impressive part is I had all this done in just over 24 hours from the N AS arriving at my house. I have also been able to setup an rsync that will allow me to migrate the data from my 2020 Terramaster (which I plan on using for backups). I will be setting up my new switch (2.5TB) and running the 4 NASs on that going forward with a total of 120TB. I'm hoping this will be my last upgrade for a while. I definitely recommend this product, although my NAS needs are basically pretty simple and all the info needed to get up and running was very easy to find online in a couple youtube videos or guides. The user interface is fairly intuitive and performance like I said is much better than anything I've worked on to date. The TerraMaster does offer a bit higher specs for 20% less, and I'm assuming I just got as bad one, but I do think this QNAP is much better than my current 2020 Terramaster and the one I tried to setup a couple weeks ago.