Gadgetory

welcome back to hardware unbox guys today I'm checking out an extremely cool NASA product two naps TBS for 5:30 a now I felt the need to specify it was indeed an ass because on first impression the unit's pretty unrecognizable as a network attached storage device juniper given this new form factor in the moniker Nass book and like a notebook computer it can be tucked under your arm and carried around with these the idea behind this is that you can quickly unplug the four five three a put it in your laptop bag and take it to events such as meetings and presentations to display stored files and high-definition multimedia content adding to its usefulness for these sorts of scenarios the device is extremely quiet mostly thanks to the fact that it utilizes m2 SSD storage now I know what you're thinking m2 storage isn't cheap but these days you can pick up a terabyte of m2 is storage for a little over 250 US so it's becoming more affordable having said that it definitely would come at a pretty big cost to equip this thing with a serious amount of storage but I don't think that's what this NASA POC is designed for rather the TBS 4 v 3a is designed to be in all occasions portable storage server land switch home theater PC replacement and much more through its try and improving qts software which I'll look at a little more closely later now though let's check out the physical design and features you can see here how small the device is and trust me the thing is light it's just 724 grams with no storage inside and seriously how much does an m2 SSD weigh close to nothing so fully stocked with four m2 drives the weight difference isn't even noticeable it's small - coming in at just 230 mil wide 165 mildy and it's just 25 millimeters thick mini will easily fit in most laptop bags as I said now let's check out the connectivity starting at the back there's an impressive range of options including two HDMI ports two USB 3 ports an audio out jack 2 mic jacks for karaoke action for gigabit networks switch ports and a final standalone Ethernet port right by the DC input which is interesting in its own right this device can accept DC input anywhere between 10 volts and 20 volts this supplied adapter is 65 Watts 19 volts b'keen app says the flexibility makes it for industrial factory and other environments that require different voltages moving to the side there's a cleverly placed USB 2 port that's extremely handy for plugging in your wireless mouse and keyboard receiver beside a long cooling then lastly at the front of the device there's a USB OneTouch copy button at the far left which allows you to quickly copy data from a portable USB storage device followed by 2 USB 3 ports and an SD card reader there's three green LED indicators in the middle and handily on the far right we have volume controls and lastly the power button now the TBS 4 5 3 8 isn't just limited to the m2 storage inside rather it can be expanded upon greatly by connecting to not separately purchased expansion enclosures which connect by a USB 3.0 at the moment there's an option for either an 8 bay or 5 bay expansion that will allow you large amounts of storage and will perhaps be suited to staying at home ready to be reconnected when you take the NASA book out for an adventure there are two network modes supported by the device 2 firstly network switch mode where it simply acts as a switch to share internet and gnash resources and then also a private network mode where you can create secure environments for functions such as recording CCTV footage and the like at the heart of the device this entails impressive 14 nanometer cell Ron and 3150 SOC which is a quad core that operates at 1.6 gigahertz with a boot clock of 2.0 8 gigahertz equipped with the Intel HD graphics engine utilizing 12v use clocked at 320 megahertz with a 640 megahertz burst rate the TDP for the CPU is an extremely low 6 Watts in terms of memory there are two options out of the box 4 gigabytes or eight gigabytes and that's per usual you'll pay a hefty price premium for the larger memory option the difference is actually a hundred and fifty US dollars and this seems like a bit much but also seems to be the way of the industry I'm actually surprised not to see a 16 gigabyte option but I believe the processor used can only support up to an 8 gigabyte maximum storage wires as mentioned you can only crown m2 SSD is inside and we've got space for four of them these utilize the SATA interface so bandwidth is limited to 6 gigabytes per second rendering nvme drives redundant but hey so do the gigabit network connection anyway but this is still fast enough for most use case scenarios including streaming 4k video for example QNAP software is some of if not the best nasty vice software going around so I expected installation to be a walk in the park and it was with internet available in the NASA connected to your network you simply visit start Coon opcom and follow the simple on-screen prompts from there once installed the qts software is both beautiful and intuitive acting and appearing quite similar to a standard Windows OS environment there's the familiar taskbar and desktop icons which can be grouped and there are three modes to switch between based and what device are using to access the software tab for tablets window and frameless the overall look and feel of the qts software is great and it really goes a long way to making the entire device scene premium there's seriously a ton of software features and I won't go over all them in detail we might literally be here for days let's look at some of the key ones there's a cool dashboard which gives you important hardware statistics as well as a resource monitor and all of these Dashboard widgets can be dragged and dropped onto the desktop the control panel is powerful - here you can access things like system settings privilege settings network services and application settings there's a storage manager of course and this allows you to identify format and check on drives as well as pick the raid level that suits your needs here you can also create I scuzzy storage arrays and add targets of other key nap nas devices to the NASA's virtual disks QNAP snapshot feature is also a brilliant backup system allowing you to recover specific files in a folder or an entire folder without having a time-consuming you recover an entire data set as well as other powerful functions controlling Nass basics such as external devices network settings network services shared folders and more is simple intuitive and powerful in the qts software - but perhaps the best part is Qun apps apps enter here you can quickly search the library install remove and update existing apps and browse categorized apps including to nap zone recommendations think Google Play for your Android there's a huge range of apps and Coon app even goes to the effort of certifying apps you know you'll have no issues if there's a lot of interest I can go further into the software features included but most of fairly self-explanatory including download station video stations surveillance station and more the last software feature that's certainly worth mentioning though is the Linux station this allows you to quickly and easily turn the nasa into a pc with a pre-configured Ubuntu distribution and the entire process is just about idiot-proof even I did it for marking NASA products we use the Intel NASA performance toolkit if you haven't seen or heard of NASA PT before it's the file system exercise or an analysis tool designed to enable direct measurement of home network attached storage this tool emulates the behavior of an actual application to provide real-world workloads of typical data applications used by home users for testing this Hebe s45 3a has been configured using a single transcend MTS 800 512 gigabyte Drive unfortunately I don't have more than one of these drive spare at the moment so I couldn't test raid nevertheless the performance of the TBS 4 v 3a is very strong and we can see that in many of the tests it's able to max out the gigabit network connection with performance just north of a hundred megabytes per second taking a look at the application performance receive an impressive performance in all four tests and the photo album and office productivity performance was very strong now when looking at the file and directory copying results we see the TBS 453 a again does very well especially given us being compared to some pretty stiff competition the download are from NASA performances Intel labels that was most impressive the qnap TBS 453 a sure is different it's a pioneer of sorts and its form factor and function and ultimately a very niche product as is often the case with niche products the TBS 4 v 3 is a little on the expensive side the compact form factor comes in an obvious storage capacity trade-off too but this can be somewhat worked around with kynapse expansion units but again these come at a cost the device presents itself as the ultimate solution for those seeking a portable NASA with awesome multimedia options that's strangely but also oddly conveniently you can double as a network switch as stated the qnap software is best in its class this is always a strong Pro in favor of any QNAP device on the downside though the boot time is curiously long and the $150 premium for the privilege of a 4 gigabyte of RAM upgrade is very steep and that's us prices the 4 gigabyte version goes for 450 US dollars while the a gigabyte can be had for a whopping 600 USD meanwhile in Australia we get stung even harder the 4 gigabyte model were brand new $700 and the a gigabyte model starts at 950 ouch don't forget to add shipping so all in all this is a damn cool powerful fast and feature-rich device just be prepared to pay for it it'll be interesting to see the markets response this kind of device and to see where the other companies come along with similar solutions with this kind of NASA suit your needs let me know in the comments I'm your host Matt as always and I'll see you guys next time youtubers like me depend on your support to continue improving the quality and content of our videos to support the channel directly consider becoming a patron to also get access to eve of cool rewards and exclusive giveaways also don't forget you can check prices and buy the products I looked at in this video through the Amazon links in the video description below thank you kindly for supporting me and the hardware own box channel it means a lot to me and I really do appreciate it and in return I'll continue to work as hard as I can to keep producing the content you enjoy