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The TS-453Be is a smart looking, compact 4-bay NAS design finished in black, with a metallic blue-gray front bezel strip housing the power button, indicator LEDs and the front USB port. The three indicators are for, from top to bottom, Status, LAN activity and USB activity. Towards the bottom of the bezel is the USB 3.0 port for the One Touch Copy button that sits under it.
The rear panel is dominated by the cooling grill for the 120mm fan. To the left of this grill sit all the external ports. There are three vertically mounted 3.5mm jacks, two microphone inputs and one line out. Under these are two HDMI v1.4b ports and then four USB 3.0 Type A ports, which are vertically mounted and sit next to a pair of Gigabit LAN ports.
The tool free drive bays sit behind a glossy piano black front panel which slides on and off, though there is a lock to hold it in place. There are no locks on the drive trays themselves.
The drive trays are made of plastic and have grab handles moulded into them. The trays are held in place with small latches. Supporting both 3.5in and 2.5in drives, the larger drives are held in place by plastic strips that fit into grooves in the drive tray's sides, and each plastic strip has pins that fit through the tray and into the drive's side mounting holes.
These mounting holes in the tray sides have anti-vibration grommets fitted. If you want to make sure the drives are installed firmly, you can use the screws provided to fix the drive via holes in the tray base. 2.5in drives can only be fixed via these holes in the tray base.
The TS-453Be supports a PCIe 2.0 x2 slot which sits at the top rear edge of the motherboard and can be accessed with the cover removed. The slot can be used to house a 10GbE network, WiFi, USB 3.1 cards or one of QNAP’s QM2 cards. There are a range of QM2 cards that feature dual M.2 slots and/or 10GbE connectivity supporting SSD caching and QNAP’s Qtier auto-tiering technology for improved NAS performance.
