QNAP TS-212 Digital Home Series 6TB (2 x 3TB) 2 Bay All-in-One Desktop Turbo NAS Server Multimedia Station

Very flexible, very reliable, great box that continues to delight
It appears this NAS box is loved or hated on the reviews, I personally love it.

I imagine some of the difficulties experienced by other users could be a faulty box, their other equipment, a different firmware version or different needs. But with my set up (iphones, ipad, macbooks, imac, ps3 and windows PCs) I now have a great experience.

I now have my NAS set up to do the following things with no issues
- Stream all types of media to ipad, iphone, macbook, ps3, Apple TV, Sony Network TV, windows PC
- Be my time machine backup for two macbooks
- fileshare (copyright free or freeware) files
- Set up as RAID 1, so I have two copies of data to reduce risk of data loss

I've some bigger drives on order, after which I will migrate over my iPhoto library, and back up my iMac.

Good points
- Quiet, uses hardly any power, MUCH QUICKER and more likely to stream video than a USB drive connected to a network router
- Unlike...

QNAP TS-212 Digital Home Series 6TB (2 x 3TB) 2 Bay All-in-One Desktop Turbo NAS Server Multimedia Station

Incredible piece of kit
Ok, where to start? If you are reading this then you must be thinking about a NAS server. I'll try and review my one as best possible.
I researched these (my one is a Qnap 212-TS Turbo) for about 2 months along with the Synology 212J and as far as I'm concerned this IS THE BEST.

Just a short note to also say I bumped into the I.T. lads at work, told them I was getting one of these and they said they are "incredible, do everything and anything and they install them for all their client" - Gotta say, I felt a lot better after this as I knew I'd chosen the right piece of kit.

So, out of the box we have the enclosure. Nice looking, tidy, solid piece of kit with plenty of flashing lights on the front. I went for ordering two seperate 3TB drives (Seagate 3.5 inch 3TB Barracuda Desktop Hard Drive) after I looked up the compatibility on the Qnap website. If you are wanting this type of...

QNAP TS-212 Digital Home Series 6TB (2 x 3TB) 2 Bay All-in-One Desktop Turbo NAS Server Multimedia Station

Some fundamental problems
I advised my Brother-in-law to get this product so that I could install NAS on his home network to provide safety and a central storage repository for all the family. The hard drives (2*1TB) were purchased separately and I took on the responsibility for making sure the whole thing worked. I spent a very frustrating weekend trying to get the system operational and realised that there are some fundamental issues with this product.

The instructions and Youtube videos imply that it is a trivial job to install the hard drives and get the unit operational. That was not my experience. I followed the start up instructions to download and install the latest firmware and following apparently successful update the unit refused to initialise. After spending hours on the internet and attempting all of the procedures provided on the QNAP website, I never obtained the steady green light showing the unit was ready for use. As soon as you look on the web you find that this is a very common...

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