The TS-h973AX I was sent must have sat inside its box for at least TWO YEARS since the firmware version of the operating system was not even on their list of firmware versions going back that far. This made migration from my TS-563 especially difficult because the normal procedure for changing the firmware from QuTShero to QTS would not work. The good news is that QNAP technical support was excellent and the agent worked at it until he was able to get the latest version of QTS installed. I could have complained and asked Amazon to send me another but it is unclear I could be sure the replacement wouldn't also have the outdated firmware and the repackaging, unpack-aging and installing the drives, not to mention the wait time discouraged me from going this route. The device itself is now just fine but whoever is responsible (Amazon or QNAP) for sending a device with 2 year old firmware should be told this is not acceptable.

been using qnap's for a while but this is the first time I am using ZFS based nas system. And I am impressed.Solid performance and lot of space saved thanks to ZFS deduplication and compression. I replaced 8gb memory module with 2X 32gb for ZFS.

I'm a long-time Synology user, but QNAP uses ZFS in this new OS, so I thought I'd try it out. The hardware specs are great and there are plenty of options on caching and management of the device. It's fast enough on file transfers, getting about the same speed as its competitors. Great that is has the capability to step up in speed to a 10GBE connection when you are ready, no need to buy an extra adapter. Comes with everything you need to get up and running. I "DO" like that the whole storage pool is up and ready in minutes as opposed to 2 days to build the RAID array.Here is the stuff you will want to pay attention to when picking QNAP versus Synology in terms of usability. First of all, this device really takes about 10 minutes to get booted up and in a state where it is truly usable, whereas Synology comparable units are up in less than half that time. It has been really finnicky about the network. I have a 1GBE LACP 802.3ad switch that I use for all LAGG duties and whenever I link aggregate a Synology unit, it sets up the interface and is ready to go in just a few minutes. I have tried link aggregation multiple ways with the QNAP and every time, it gets hung while creating the trunk and I have to shut it down from QFINDER. When I bring it back up, the interface is in the correct mode, but I should not have to spend 20 minutes each time I want to change the network interface. In that sense, almost anything you do in the interface seems to take drastically longer than anything I do in the same context on Synology.So again, the pros are: Really fast RAID creation, multiple (and different speed) RJ45 ports including a 10GBE and two x 2.5GBE ports. Good transfer rates. We will have to see how reliability is. 8GB seems to be plenty of memory for it out of the box. If you know how to exploit it's features, it's a great platform.Cons: Really slow to effect any changes in the OS. Takes 10 minutes to get to usable state on boot. A bit harder to find what you are looking for versus the more intuitive Synology interface. Network interface changes are clunky.Once I got it setup, it's really a backup unit to other devices and should do fine. I really dislike the bootup speed and the time it takes to effect changes in the system.I have many NAS units here, so it was pretty easy to do a side-by-side comparison for my use case(s). For my use case(s), it gets a 3 of 5 stars, mostly because of the bootup speed and change effect speed. Your use case may differ and you may be using it as a 24/7 NAS where I am only spinning this up two days out of the week for a few hours.Hope this gives everyone at least some things to think about when purchasing.

**UPDATE 3**The system was still running FAR slower than it should for a device of this hardware potential. After some intense investigation, I discovered that LUKS encryption is bugged in the QNAP QuTS Hero kernel, causing all operations on encrypted disks (and interacting with those disks) to be far slower than expected. This was confirmed when running cryptsetup benchmark (the Linux utility used to test a system's encryption/decryption speed) on the NAS directly, then once again on a VM running on the same NAS. The VM used a different kernel, and encryption/decryption operations were many times faster. Lowering to two stars until this is addressed, but QNAP support is aware and have escalated this to their R&D.QNAP support is pretty good - they're able to communicate with people who have very low technical ability and very high technical ability.**UPDATE 2**After re-pasting the CPU and cleaning/re-seating the cable/card to the drive cage from the motherboard, I updated to the latest QuTS Hero and reinitialized the NAS with the storage hard drives removed and only the OS SSDs installed. Since then, everything is going very well and the fan speed is quiet. I may have just gotten a bad one off the line. Probably my own bad luck. It's working quiet well now.**UPDATE**In my quest to figure out what the heck is going wrong on it, I decided to look at the anemic thermal solution on the CPU. It's a bit weak and has no direct fan on it, but there is a fan header there so adding a little 20mm fan works wonders. The worst part was the thermal paste. Look at the picture. They only pasted 2/3 of the CPU. No wonder I was having problems.Even still: Days later and indexing/thumbnailing isn't done still. Original review below:I got it right when their 5.0 OS release came out and they introduced SO MANY bugs.1: Fan curve is terrible. It's going to max when the CPU is 60C. It is REALLY LOUD. Support says it's a known bug and will be fixed in the next release, and downgrade to fix it. It didn't fix. Setting it to a manual fan curve causes the system to believe it is overheating even when it is at 66C.2: Thumbnail generation and indexing is horribly slow. Still not done after >2 weeks.3: Their ZFS implementation is wholly trash. ZFS ARC is taking over 50% memory and won't release it and kills SERVICES instead of lowering ARC size and there's nowhere to set a lower ARC limit. Upgrading to 32GB RAM had the SAME problem. **UPDATE** it's now possible to set an ARC limit from 40-70 percent but no higher or lower. Set to 40% after a 64GB RAM upgrade and it STILL killed a bunch of services overnight for no known reason.4: You need to know what you're getting itno with ZFS. For example: if you build a ZFS pool with 4 drives, you cannot add a fifth drive for more capacity. It just CAN'T happen.5: Don't even think of using ZFS deduplication or compression and still run services. This system doesn't have enough RAM.6: The hardware design is horrible for cooling. The fan pulls air through the drives, but doesn't have a direct airflow over the CPU heatsink.Also, my unit was missing a rubber foot. You'd expect more for the price. I purchased and attached my own set.I will come back and edit this review if I can work through more of this.

Bought this awhile back when Google decided to stop hosting photos with unlimited capacity. Figured it was time to build my own cloud or start opening separate google accounts to "shuffle" my backup from account to account once I ran out of space.Fortunately I picked one of these up along with several new SATA based EXOS Seagate hard drives BEFORE the Chia craze took off and prices exploded. Currently hosting around 40TB inside - a few drives that are old in Raid5 and newer drives in JBOD format. The ZFS system seems to work well and flagged a faulty Seagate early enough I could order a new drive replacement just before it failed. (close call)I've currently only populated a few of the SSD slots and haven't found a u.2 drive that's cheap enough to justify the upgrade, but can do that a bit down the road post CHIA craze and after upgrading the network to 10Gbps.Love the fact that this really is an AMD embedded processor inside - running docker with CHIA mining, minecraft, and Pi-Hole adblock servers on board, and could easily add more webhosting/cloud functionality when I had time.With the power draw as low as it is, I'm not afraid leaving it in my coat closet as it doesn't overheat like a larger scale CPU with uATX board running linux might.Thanks QNAP - keep the security strong and the kernel updates coming! Would love to see a better package manager on the host, but I imagine that might bring security risks and am ok with running docker ubuntu containers when necessary to get extra functionality.