Manufacturer: QNAP Price: $ 390 US Author: Steven Walton Date: 01/15/2015

[ Introduction ]

On hand is the new QNAP TS-431 budget NAS offering home users 4-bay storage at an affordable price. Although this is a budget orientated NAS the TS-431 still has plenty to offer users in the way of features and performance... Back in July 2014 we got our first look at the QNAP TS-x51 series when we checked out the TS-451, the 4-bay model. Powered using an Intel Celeron J1800 "Bay Trail-D" (22 nm) SoC, this NAS offered Full HD transcode support making it the ultimate home theater solution. The TS-451 impressed us immensely with its strong performance and surprisingly affordable $450 price tag. The TS-451 certainly has a lot to offer, but if you aren’t in need of a NAS that can replace your HTPC then it could be considered overkill. Therefore QNAP moved on to release a more affordable cut down TS-x31 series. The new budget range drops the dual-core Intel Celeron J1800 2.41GHz SoC and its 1GB DDR3L RAM for a cheaper dual-core Freescale ARM Cortex-A9 SoC clocked at 1.2GHz with just 512MB of RAM. Despite the downgrades made to the core hardware, the TS-x31 series is still very capable. Important features such as dual Gigabit LAN for fault tolerance or link aggregation and USB 3.0 are still present, while the series offers respectable 110 MB/s read and 80 MB/s write performance. The series offers 1-bay, 2-bay and 4-bay models, while today’s review will be based on the TS-431, the four bay model. Priced at $390 the TS-431 is 13% cheaper than the TS-451, and if we are honest that isn’t a lot given the downgraded hardware. It will be interesting to see how the two compare in terms of performance, while we are also keen to compare the TS-431 to Synology’s similarly priced DS414j.

Table of Contents >>> Introduction <<< Features & Design Hardware QNAP Qfinder 4.2.3 Installation QNAP Turbo System 4.1 Test System & Power Consumption Benchmarks: File Download Performance Benchmarks: File Upload Performance Benchmarks: File Copy Performance Benchmarks: CrystalDiskMark 3.0 Benchmarks: Atto Disk Benchmark Conclusion Next Page ->

RainMaker

Posted on: 01/14/2015 10:50 AM There is a plus version of this NAS now, the TS-431+ and it has more memory. I am more interested in that model.

Mago	Posted on: 01/28/2015 07:14 AM When is the TS-431+ arriving?

ActionMan

Posted on: 01/30/2015 12:22 AM I really want a review on the plus version please since I cannot find the AS7004T or AS5104T anywhere.

Sherman

Posted on: 02/04/2015 02:18 AM Great website you have here but I was curious about if you knew of any user discussion forums that cover the same topics talked about in this article? I'd really love to be a part of online community where I can get feedback from other experienced individuals that share the same interest. If you have any recommendations, please let me know. Thanks!

Yohan

Posted on: 02/15/2015 10:41 AM What is going on with the power consumption figures, are they correct? It seems the TS-431 has twice the power consumption compared to the more powerful TS-451. This is strange.

Scooter

Posted on: 03/28/2015 07:16 AM Note that the TS-431 does *not* support virtualization, due to it being ARM-based. However, the TS-451 does, as it's Intel Celeron-based.