QNAP TS-251+ / TS-451+ NAS Review - Plex, Video, running Windows and HDMI! (virtually)

Buy it on Amazon - (affiliate link) - The Qnap TS-215+ NAS is capable of running Windows and has HDMI for media playback and web browsing.
VIDEO INDEX:
00:02 - Hardware overview
03:18 - Disk speed test over gigabit ethernet
03:40 - Overview of web control panel and user interface
06:01 - Overview of HDMI interface and web browsing
07:03 - Kodi and Plex demonstration through the HDMI
09:39 - Blu Ray MKV video transcoded to smartphone in real time
11:18 - Plex server performance
12:52 - Running Windows through the virtualization station
15:09 - Conclusion and final thoughts
The device is powered by a speedy quad core Intel Celeron J1900 processor. It can upgraded to 8 gigabytes of RAM which is needed when running some of the more extreme tasks like video serving and OS virtualization.
It also has an HDMI output with a very nice user interface when connected to a monitor or television. Plex Home Theater as well as Kodi are accessible from there. It plays back Blu Ray MKV files very well with no issues, although it does not support 23.976 frame rates, Dolby TrueHD or DTS-HD formats. Regular Dolby Digital and DTS do work.
Like other NAS devices it's not well suited as Plex server if you have a videos that need to be transcoded in real time to target devices. Real time encoding works much better on the Qnap native apps. The reason is that Plex is not optimized for the Celeron processor running on the Qnap.
But I was surprised to see that the drive is capable of running Windows in a virtual machine environment on the box! Qnap offers a free virtualization utility for the NAS that effortlessly booted up a copy of Windows 10.
This is a very feature complete NAS that is definitely worth considering - especially if you have a few servers you'd like to replace that don't need a lot of processing power to do their tasks.
See my NAS 101 video here:
See my Plex 101 video here:
See the list of compatible drives here:
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