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The TVS-872N is a compact tower NAS with a metal chassis supporting eight vertically mounted drive bays. Above the drive bays is a smoked plastic panel that 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.
At the other end of the panel to the LCD screen are the indicator LEDs. These are for Status, LAN activity, USB in use and a pair for the two M.2 ports. Under these is an IR sensor and each of the eight drive bays has an indicator LED above it.
Just below the power button on the front of the unit is the one-touch copy button which has a single USB 3.1 Gen 2 Type-A port built into it. How this button handles data from an external drive can be configured in the QTS OS.
Dominating the rear panel of the TVS-872N are the pair of grills for the two 120mm system cooling fans. Above the fans to the left-hand side of the panel is the external access for the PCIe slots, also situated here is the reset button.
To the left of the fans are the ports. First up is an HDMI 2.0 port, under which sits the 5GbE port. Then comes a group of six ports; the two Gigabit Ethernet ports, a pair of USB 3.1 Gen 2 Type-C ports, a USB 3.1 Gen 2 Type-A port and a USB 3.0 Type-A port. Towards the bottom of the panel are the line-in and microphone ports.
The eight 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 drive’s 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 trays support 2.5in drives and the only way to fix them is to use the bundled screws (24) to go through the bottom of the tray into the drive.
The two SODIMM memory slots sit behind a cut-out in the inner panel next to drive bay one (there's a little label on the top of the NAS showing how the drive bays are numbered). The TVS-872N comes with 8GB of DDR4-2666 memory but the motherboard supports up to a maximum of 32GB via these two slots.
The TVS-872N comes with a pair PCIe 3.0 slots. The top one runs at x16 speed and is controlled by the CPU while below that sits the x4 slot, looked after by the PCH. If you in any doubt which one's which, the motherboard is clearly marked to show you.
Handily the two M.2 2280 NVMe drive slots are tool-free, they don’t use the usual small screw to hold them in place, instead, they use a plastic pin system.
Besides the two 120mm system cooling fans, there are two 60mm blower fans and a massive heatsink to keep the CPU nice and cool. Even with this many fans, the TVS-872N is very quiet during normal operations.
