Inside the plentiful external box, we find both the NAS and a small box of accessories. These accessories include a first-time setup guide, external PSU, mains power cable, screws and keys for the individual media bays and an ethernet cable for connecting the device to your existing router or switch. All quite standard stuff it has to be said but short of the storage media, it’s everything you’re going to need to set this system up. Note: Use only QNAP memory modules to maintain system performance and stability. For NAS devices with more than one memory slot, use QNAP modules with identical specifications.

Warning: Using unsupported modules may degrade performance, cause errors, or prevent the operating system from starting. That is plenty of ventilation on the base of the device but there does seem to be less ventilation on either side of the main plastic chassis than I would ideally like, especially for a 9-bay storage system. I had this system running for several days during testing and comparisons and during that time, temperatures were not a problem, but still, I would have liked to have seen a little bit more ventilation on such a compact device. Overall I genuinely like the design and structure of the TS-h973AX hardware so far, although there is the odd placement of things that I take slight issue with.That large cooling fan (measuring 140mm), although almost disproportionate on a system of this scale, is exactly what this triple storage tier system needs and although the RPM can be adjusted by the user, it is recommended that it is left to adjust automatically. It is certainly the biggest single rear cooling fan I have ever seen in a desktop NAS, but understandable nevertheless. SSD Caching Monitor and Advisor – Allowing you to scale your SSD cache as needed, or get recommendations on how much you need Ventilation throughout the device is taken care of in a few small ways. The storage bays have sufficient spacing around them to allow air to pass over the storage media, internal PCB and heat sinks. There is the large rear fan we will talk about in a bit and there are ventilation holes on one side of the chassis and across a large area of the base. Likewise, although the system features other arguably more pedestrian Ethernet ports, even these are 2.5 GbE each, meaning they are are 2.5 x the performance bandwidth available compared with traditional ethernet. These 2.5GbE ports also support trunking / link aggregation, which means that the system can combine these ports together to create a 5GbE (500MB per second) connection to be used in conjunction with the 1000MB per second port previously mentioned. Overall, that is a huge amount of performance available externally and this in conjunction with the triple-tier storage available and higher performing ZFS file system is a hugely ambitious and impressive architecture at this price point. QNAP TS-h973AX NAS Review – Internal Hardware

Install high-performance U.2 NVMe PCIe Gen 3 x4 SSDs or SATA 6Gb/s SSDs in the dedicated SSD slots for cache acceleration and improved random I/O. Note: The application is available in the App Center and in virtual appliance marketplaces (VMware vSphere ESXi and Microsoft Hyper-V). While the QuTS hero software is laden with advanced features, the learning curve is gentle as it looks and feels very similar to the standard QTS firmware. That said, we spotted one difference right away: our three 14TB Seagate IronWolf NAS HDDs were assembled into a 24TB RAID5 storage pool in five minutes, while the job could have taken a day under QTS.

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There is an additional 2x SATA SSD bays that, once again, are plastic and screwless in their design. drives in all of these bays are held in place by plastic clips that line-up directly with the screw holes inside each bay. This is by no means mandatory and the TS-h973AX arrives with more than enough screws for 2.5/3.5″ media to be more rigidly installed if you prefer. The SATA SSD installed in these bays are generally regarded for use as additional cache towards the hard drive storage array, allowing their high performance and IOPS benefits to be passed on to the larger, more affordable, but slower hard drive RAID array. Note: At least 1 GB RAM is required. The maximum number of channels supported varies by NAS model, network configuration, and camera settings. For more information, visit https://www.qnap.com/go/qvr-nas-selector.

Cloud storage gateways realize hybrid cloud applications by working with the cache space reserved on NAS to ensure low-latency data access to the cloud. One thing I will highlight is that I’m glad the system arrived with a CAT6 cable and not a CAT5e. Recently I have noticed a number of ways in which some brands have cut corners, small as they might be, in saving costs and it’s still annoying to me when a 10GbE equipped system arrives with a CAT5e cable. I’m pleased to see that the TS-h973AX is not among those devices. QNAP reserves the right to replace partial parts or accessories if the original is no longer available from its manufacturer/supplier. Any replacement would be fully tested and verified to meet strict compatibility and stability guidelines and will deliver identical performance to the original.The maximum number of channels supported varies by NAS model, network configuration, and camera settings. For more information, visit https://www.qnap.com/solution/qvr-face/en-us/ Internally, things are kept tidy and well-spaced. Removing all of the available storage trays shows us a very clean selection of media interfaces. No loose cables, no separate data and power connectors, things are very structure inside this system.