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The QNAP TVS-673e is a well built, compact 6-bay NAS finished in a stylish pale gold colour. Apart from the six main drive bays, the front bezel is home to a monochrome backlit LCD display with Enter and Select buttons. The panel allows you to power on and off the NAS, view and configure network TCP/IP settings and displays warning messages if there is a problem with the NAS. Usefully, the LCD display can also display information about the NAS drives and volumes.
Just below the power button on the front of the unit is the one touch copy button which has a single USB 3.0 port built into it. How this button handles data from an external drive can be configured in the QTS OS. Below this is the USB QuickAccess port which enables the setting up of the TVS-673e without the need to be attached to a network.
If you don't happen to have a USB 3.0 A – Micro B cable or a USB 2.0 A – Micro B cable lying around, then you will have to buy one, as for some reason QNAP don't bundle one with the NAS.
The rear panel of the TVS-673e is home to the rest of the ports but dominating the panel are the grills for the two 90mm system cooling fans. All the ports sit to the left of these grills. There are four Gigabit Ethernet ports, three USB 3.0 Type-A (two vertically mounted, one horizontally) ports, a pair of HDMI 1.4b ports and three 3.5mm audio ports.
One side panel of the NAS has cooling holes arranged in a stylish Q for QNAP.
The six 3.5in drive bay doors have a simple sliding locking mechanism. These locks work well and although they are not as secure as proper drive bay key locks they are certainly better than nothing.
The 3.5in drive trays are tool free. A plastic strip fits into the side rails with a pin at either end that goes through the corresponding holes in the rail sides. These pins then lock into the screw holes on the drives side – simple but effective. If you want to make sure the drives don’t move then QNAP has supplied enough screws (3 per drive) to fix them in place. The holes in the tray sides have rubber vibration reducing grommets fitted.
The TVS-673e comes with a pair PCIe 3.0 x4 slots. Because of the compactness of the NAS, there is a complication when it comes to fitting any cards in these slots – you have to remove the 250W power supply first. A bit annoying but we think it's a price worth paying in return for the compactness of the unit.
