QNAP TS-231K 2 Bay Home NAS with Two 1GbE Ports

I have very little to no experience with a NAS. The company I work for uses one and I have access to it is the only experience. They use Synology. I was able to get this thing going with no help in a few hours. It is a little slow with heavy use but light use it seems do do great. I would highly recommend it if you have little to no experience with a NAS.

If you are looking at this you are looking for mass storage for pictures, videos, or anything that you need to store. However it’s a bit too expensive in my opinion, if you build your own computers you can totally do better than this. The underpowered CPU and 1gb of ram is unacceptable for 2021. If you have multiple people accessing this it will get slow quick. However since it’s mostly just me accessing this NAS, it’s perfectly fine, even two or three people can access at the same time and still be ok. However if you have the technical know how to build your own NAS, I would take that every time. I’m giving this four stars because it didn’t seem hyped in the description and it does what I need it to do, I just want people to make an informed decision before purchasing.

Bought this product for a private personal cloud and it is an excellent product. It replaced all my services on my phone, all my photos, videos and documents are uploaded automatically and sorts my pictures with face recognition on my QNAP TS-231K. No more storing my digital life on other cloud servers. This product officially makes it private. It also has a feature called the music station which I have uploaded my music library to my QNAP TS-231K and I could listen to my music when I am on road. Thank you QNAP excellent product. Tech support was very knowledgeable and communicated very well to answer a question I had. The interface on QNAP TS-231K is very user-friendly and has illustrations for examples to get a high level explanation for each section.

(Revised and lowered the score due to continuous instability and extremely slow response after upgrade to latest reboot.)Strangely enough there was a YouTube review by some self proclaimed expert on the NAS systems, who assured the audience that while Synology is more about apps, QNAP is about stable HW and software.Don't believe any such hogwash. QNAP NAS in general has a bunch of very inexperienced HW designers, who chose a CPU by an Amazon subsidiary, which claims it is superior to most of the NAS CPUs out there. NOT TRUE AT ALL! Annapurna CPUs are NOT for this purpose and it is a bad choice with very response time.On top of this QNAP seems to have issues creating proper embedded SW image. The boot time is ridiculous -- over 2 and a half minutes. Why? What is taking so long? This is the slowest booting system I have ever seen. Even MS Windows does not take that long on a slow HW with low memory and bad, slow HDD.Linux based system, even embedded (like on a NAS or a home router) boots much, much quicker than that. Synology NAD for example boots in less than 30 sec. Regardless of the device model.While python is a great language, QNAP does not have competent programmers. The processes sometimes fork so many instances with quite a lot of overhead, that the OS is overwhelmed with the Python interpreter, running hundreds (yes hundreds) processes, which it keeps piling and does not respond, at which point I have to hold the Power button for > 10 seconds and downgrade to a stable SW version, which is released about 2-3 months ago. This happened to me twice with two separate builds (FW updates). What a sloppy and incompetent job. With latest FW version I was able to stabilize the runtime state, but I had to go into the console and kill all spawned Python processes by hand, which took me a while, since the system was very slow to respond. Once I killed the processes it returned to its quiet state with the stable previously mentioned firmware.Alter all this when I filed a ticket and a rep asked me to give him access to MY DATA. Yes, they would ask you to use TeamViewer and expose all your work and data to a customer service rep. RRRRIIIGGGHHTT!!! I did not believe what I am hearing. Really, wanna see my data? How dare you ask such a privacy violation action? Apparently QNAP does not have privacy policy and does not respect any such out there at all.Last thing was really unbelievable. Instead of asking for logs, diagnostics data, the rep said they cannot help me diagnose myself and and I have to wait for their new release.I would like to challenge the competency of the SMEs in QNAP from HW designers, software integrator and developers to CSRs. I am wondering who is running this company and how did they get so many nice reviews? Is there something fishy going on?

This is not a device for a novice or inexperienced hi-tech storage person. The levels of security / encryption and device management are exceptional and can provide close to financial grade security with multiple levels of authentication. A group of ten people can use this effectively if they are not intensely updating large files. Works well on a symmetrical gig network and has highly configurable notifications, warnings and the like. Do not buy if this is your first attempt to master networked RAID storage that will connect with multiple platforms that are located in many different geographical locations.

I bought two of these for movie storage. That makes four QNAP NAS drives that I have. I really appreciate the "Qfinder Pro" app on my desktop which makes it real easy to access and configure these devices.

Installs as easily as other QNAP NASs. Only has 1GB of RAM that is not upgradeable/ expandable. The lack of memory affects applications (Plex in my case). Works great as basic network storage.

In 2024, QNAP seems to have gotten their act together, at least software-wise. The only problem I still have after 3 years is that the reboot process usually hangs. (I suppose I could reformat and reinstall, but I have decided that I do not want to go through that trouble.)

Easy to setup. Documentation with the NAS is easy to understand and work with.Warranty is good at 2 years.After sales support is very helpful.

Muy compacto así, que no ocupa lugar

Equipamento muito bom, com ótimas ferramentas de gerenciamento e monitoramento, inclusive por App.

Just bought the TS-431K as a backup to my TS-431P that I bought many years ago. Not much has changed between the two models but I am changing my old TS-431P from Raid 6 over to Raid 5 and I needed another NAS to copy the files, reformat the old NAS then copy all the files back over. Two NAS, one for backup and the other as the Main. One of the main thing about buying a REAL QNAP NAS is the ability to run Apps within the tiny processor on the NAS. Things like DLNA, Media Apps, Web page server and even Security camera recorder. Although for myself I only use the NAS as a file storage and it gives me a peace of mind that I can create a RAID to join up four hard disk drives into one massive NAS drive. I am using four 10TB drives to create a Raid 5 with 30TB usable space. Raid 5 gives me protection from one disk failure out of four drives. Thus I can backup my NAS if a failure is indicated before swapping out the one bad drive with a brand new hard drive for rebuilding. Although you could use a single disk drive as a backup or the main and making a copy over to another hard disk drive, but the problem is that if the one hard disk drive fails you have no recourse in copying the data off the drive. Where-as a NAS with Raid 5 will give you the chance to copy the data into another disk drive if there is a one disk failure among the four disk drives. With Raid 6 you can get up to two disk drive failures before you lose the data. However with Raid 6 you only get half the usable space. For example you have 40TB by using four 10TB hard drive and with Raid 6 you will only have 20TB usable. Where-as with 40TB Raid 5 you will have 30TB usable, which is why I am converting my old TS-431P from Raid 6 to Raid 5. Last thing, the baby blue stripe isn't as baby blue in the photos. Although I can see a plastic covering over the baby blue which probably is obscuring the brightness of the baby blue. I think I will leave the plastic layer on. Anyway I highly recommend this QNAP NAS.

使いやすい。我が人生と歩んできたデータを預けて、定期的にバックアップもしています。SCSIHDD→ E-IDEHDD →  NETGEARStora  → QNAP(キューナップ)TS-431K  と渡り歩き中。本製品も末永く使いたいと思います。 NETGEARStoraQNAP(キューナップ)TS-431K