Gadgetory

hey guys today I'm taking a look at a member from one of kun apps latest nice families the TS 253 a dub does an Internet of Things centric Nath's it's actually more than just a network attached storage device rather I consider the TS 253 a to be a mini server by supporting the open source Linux platform it allows users to directly utilize various feature-rich Linux apps not only that but through the use of dual HDMI outputs users can switch between the links desktop and kun apps media focus HD station the HDMI outputs also allow for the use of dual monitors and can be configured to display either a cloned or extended desktop the HD station supports a range of feature-rich apps such as Kodi HD player Plex home theater YouTube Spotify J River Google Chrome Mozilla Firefox and more helping to make the TS 253 a feel more like a dedicated multimedia player is the bundle keynote remote control which communicates with the device using infrared along with the powerful app support hardware decoding is supported at resolutions up to 4k 4k video transcoding is also supported allowing users to convert videos to Universal formats that can be smoothly played on PCs mobile devices and smart TVs this feature is also offered offline as well using a pre-rendered lower resolution video these features have all been integrated into the latest qts 4.0 operating system which we'll take a quick look at shortly before we do that let's check out the TS 253 unit to see what's what from the front we have what I've describes an industrial looking device that probably looks more at home in a data center than your living room I think the removable three and a half inch hot-swappable drive bays mainly they give this impression all of the connectivity buttons and indicators are located in a black loss strip the runs along the left hand side of the device here we have a USB 3 port which provides convenient access for external storage devices making this port even more convenient is the quick copy button which when configured using the qts software can dump all the files from external storage into a designated folder above the quick copy button we have the power button followed by a few LEDs status lights indicating network activity as well as individual drive activity the brightness volleys these can be adjusted to using the Qt s software around the back we find three USB 3 ports taking the grand total for the device to fall and above that are the two HDMI outputs which can be used simultaneously interestingly we find a line out jack along with Jools 6.3 millimeter microphone jacks for dynamic microphones only finally we find not one but two Gigabit Ethernet ports along with a 70 millimeter cooling fan now that we've taken a tour around the TS 253 a what can you expect to find inside powering the whole operation at its heart is the Intel Celeron and 3150 quad-core system-on-chip running at clock speeds between 1.6 gigahertz and 2.0 8 gigahertz depending on how CPU intensive the task is coupled with 4 gigabytes of memory this quad core system is ready to handle some pretty serious multitasking for those interested the memory is upgradable and Keena does sell an 8 gigabyte version though it isn't very cost-effective the type of memory uses ddr3 low voltage running a 1600 megahertz setting up and configuring the TS 253 a is about as easy as it gets the setup process is intuitive and the qts software used to configure the device is highly refined I won't go into too much detail regarding the qts software for this product review and in all honesty covering in detail would call for an hour long video there are simply so many noteworthy features for benchmarking network attached storage products going forward are we using the Intel NASA performance toolkit if you haven't seen or heard an SVT before it's a 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 digital applications used by home users for testing the TS 253 a has been configured using a pair of Western Digital red pro 4 terabyte hard drives in raid 1 basically I test all 2-bay devices in raid 1 in anything larger such as the Synology ds4 1-5 play using raid 5 the performance of the TS 250 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 100 megabytes per second first let's look at the application performance here we have slightly mixed results though for the most part the TS 253 is very impressive particularly in the content creation test now when looking at the file and directory copying results receive at the most part the TS 253 a does very well especially given its being compared to some pretty stiff competition the download or from NASA performances Intel labels it was most impressive without question the TS 253 a is the ultimate Home Server slash media player this is a very powerful product that's capable of the good many things in fact there really isn't much it can't do and yet novice Tech users can take full advantage of all the features there are few nasty vices that offer hdmi out let alone dual display support so it's a very cool feature indeed and it's what allows this to be a genuine home theater pc replacement cue naps feature-rich qts operating system looks great is easy to use and it's also very responsive the addition of the hybrid S station is awesome but I have to admit I've only started to scratch the surface with what's possible here the software along with the TS 253 Ace Hardware I was able to handle any video file we threw at it the only real issue here being that were limited just thirty Hertz at 4k due to the HDMI 1.4 a support as you might expect all this greatness comes at a price and a rather large one at that the tube a model that we looked at cost five hundred US dollars or six hundred and seventy Australian and diskless form this does in my opinion make the larger four bay model are much better buy at six hundred US dollars or seven hundred and sixty AUD overall the Keen up TS 253 a is honestly the most capable and complete home user NASA I've ever come across and I have no trouble recommending it to anyone that can afford it if you have any questions let me know I'm your host Matt as always and I'll see you guys next time