QNAP TVS-872XT-i5-16G 8-bay NAS Review

Rating: 9.0.

QNAP's TVS-872XT is a high-performance 8-bay NAS that comes with 1GbE, 10GbE and Thunderbolt 3 connectivity and with a pair of PCIe and M.2 PCIe NVMe SSD slots thrown in for good measure. Is it a good buy at almost £2000?

Sitting under QNAP's SMB banner, the TVS-*72XT line-up is made up of three models, the 4-bay TVS-472XT (Intel Pentium Gold G5400T, 4GB DDR4 memory), 6-bay TVS-672XT (Intel Core i3-8100T, 8GB DDR4) and the flagship 8-bay TVS-872XT we are looking at here.

At the heart of the TVS-872XT-i5-16G, to give its full mouthful of a name, is an Intel Core i5 8400T processor. This runs at 1.7GHz (burst up to 3.3GHz) and is backed by 16GB of DDR4-2666 memory. The motherboard supports up to 32GB of memory via a pair of SODIMM slots.

Internally the NAS brings a pair of PCIe slots and support for a pair of M.2 SSDs. One of the PCIe slots is Gen3 x16 and it's this one that houses the two port Thunderbolt 3 card. The other slot is Gen 3 x4. The two M.2 slots support 2280 format NVMe SSDs and there are lists of compatible cards and drives for all these slots on QNAP's website.

Physical Specifications
Processor: Intel Core i5 8400T 1.7GHz (burst up to 3.3GHz).
Memory: 16GB DDR4-2666.
Gigabit Ethernet Ports: 2.
10GbE Ethernet Ports: 1.
Rear panel connectors: 2 x 1GbE, 1 x 10GbE, 2 x Thunderbolt 3 (via PCIe card), 2 x Audio, 2 x USB 3.1 Gen 2 Type-C, 1 x USB 3.1 Gen 2 Type A, 1 x USB 3.0 Type A, 1 x HDMI 2.0.
Front panel connectors: 1 x USB 3.1 Gen 2 Type A (One Touch Copy).
RAID support: JBOD, 0, 1, 5, 10, 50, 60.
Cooling: Active: 2 x 120mm system cooling, 2 x 60mm Blower CPU cooling.
Drive Bays Supported: 8
Maximum hard drive size supported: 14TB (main storage)
Maximum Capacity: 112TB (main storage)
PCIe slots: 1 x Gen 3.0 x 16 slot (used by Thunderbolt 3 card), 1 x Gen 3.0 x 4.
M.2 slots: 2 x 2280 NVMe
Internal File System support: EXT4
Dimensions (D x W x H): 279.6 x 329.3 x 188.2mm.
Weight: 7.06kg.

Become a Patron!