Qnap TS-h765eU review: | ITPro

Qnap’s TS-h765eU will appeal to space-poor SMBs as this 1U rack NAS is a mere 292mm deep. That means it’ll easily fit in a small wall box, a standard two-post data cabinet, or unobtrusively on a desk. It joins Qnap’s burgeoning family of low-profile rack NAS models and stands out thanks to its innovative storage arrangements. Up front you have a standard set of four hot-swap carriers supporting SATA LFF/SFF HDDs and SSDs and a peek around the back reveals three E1.S form factor bays.

The appliance includes three E1.S trays in the base price and these are already fitted with M.2 2280 NVMe SSD carriers. Alternatively, you can install higher-capacity E1.S (short) PCIe NVMe SSDs and the appliance supports 5.9mm, 9.5mm, and 15mm models.

The TS-h765eU includes dual 2.5GbE multi-Gigabit network ports but if you feel the need for more speed, the E1.S slots have another role to play. The SSD carriers can be swapped out for Qnap’s optional QXG-ES10G1T E1.S to 10GBase-T network modules with up to two supported.

Qnap TS-h765eU review: Hardware features

The TS-h765eU is the most powerful of Qnap’s short-depth appliances as it sports a comparatively modern quad-core 1.7GHz Intel Atom x7405C SoC (system on chip) with burst speeds of up to 3.4GHz and a miniscule 12W TDP. It supports DDR5 memory although the base 8GB can only be expanded to 16GB and with one SO-DIMM slot on the motherboard, you’ll have to replace the existing module.

The appliance doesn’t include a mounting kit with Qnap’s optional Rail-S01 sliding rack rail kit costing around £66. You can expand storage outside the box as the appliance supports Qnap’s 4-bay TR-004U USB 3.2 1U rack shelf which is the same depth as the TS-h765eU.

The E1.S trays are easily removed and to fit M.2 NVMe SSDs, you slot them into the carrier and let the retaining tab snap back to secure them. For E1.S PCIe NVMe SSDs, it depends on the type you choose as for 5.9mm SSDs, you simply replace the M.2 adapter and screw them directly onto the trays.

For thicker 9.5mm and 15mm models, you need to purchase Qnap’s optional Tray-E1S-01 carriers and don’t waste your money on PCIe 4 devices as the Atom CPU only has PCIe 3 lanes. Qnap offers optional heatsinks for M.2 and E1.S SSDs and we recommend using them as after creating a cache with two 800GB M.2 NVMe SSDs, we noticed the appliance’s three cooling fans ramping up – the appliance is almost silent when only using HDDs.

Qnap TS-h765eU review: Deployment and software features

We loaded four 22TB Western Digital Red Plus NAS-specific HDDs, used the browser-based quick start wizard to load the latest QuTS hero OS, and then created a big 58TB RAID5 storage pool. You can install Qnap’s more nimble QTS software but QuTS offers a lot more data protection features such as ZFS copy-on-write, near unlimited NAS and iSCSI LUN snapshots, and end-to-end checksums that handle self-healing of data corruption.

Ransomware protection is available as QuTS offers a choice of two WORM (write once read many) policies that can be applied during NAS share creation. QuTS also offers deduplication but this feature is only available when you have 16GB of memory.

QuTS offers plenty of backup apps with the Hybrid Backup Sync (HBS) 3 managing 3-2-1 protection strategies and securing local appliance data to remote NAS appliances or cloud providers including Qnap’s myQNAPcloud service. The Hyper Data Protector (HDP) app secures VMware and Hyper-V virtualized environments, presents a dedicated management web console, and can run block-level backups of Windows PCs and servers that have Qnap’s free NetBak PC agent installed.

Security services are abundant and include the Antivirus, Malware Remover, and QuFirewall apps. The Security Center app uses predefined scan policies to search for and draw your attention to vulnerabilities and it includes an unusual file activity monitor.

Qnap TS-h765eU review: 10GbE performance

For performance testing, we installed two QXG-ES10G1T modules. With a NAS share mapped over 10GbE to a Dell PowerEdge R760xs Windows Server 2022 host, we recorded Iometer sequential read and write rates both of 9.2Gbits/sec and swapping to random operations returned 9.2Gbits/sec and 9Gbits/sec.

IP SAN speeds are on the money too, with a 1TB target delivering the same speeds over 10GbE as our NAS share. We ramped up the pressure with a dual 10GbE MPIO link to the target and watched sequential read and write speeds increase to 18.4Gbits/sec and 12.9Gbits/sec. Changing to random read and write operations delivered 18.4Gbit/sec and 10.9Gbits/sec and although these numbers are impressive, we did see CPU utilization peaking as high as 95% during the write test.

It’s worth noting that we didn’t use an SSD cache during all our NAS and IP SAN tests and the Iometer random tests show clearly how efficient the QuTS ZFS ARC (adaptive read cache) and ZIL (ZFS intent log) are. A cache may provide some extra speed benefits but if you’re installing expensive E1.S NVMe SSDs, it would make more sense to use them to present a standard high-performance storage pool.

Qnap TS-h765eU review: Is it worth it?

With Qnap’s UK online store listing the TS-h765eU at £790 excluding VAT, it looks to be well worth it. Despite its miniscule dimensions, the appliance delivers an impressive hardware package and the clever storage design and 10GbE upgrade options make it very versatile.

Bearing in mind the Atom x7405C CPU supports up to 32GB of DDR5 memory, it’s a shame Qnap has limited expansion to 16GB – especially as the preferred QuTS hero OS is more memory-hungry than QTS. The good news is the appliance delivered a superb performance in our 10GbE lab tests even with only 8GB onboard.

The TS-h765eU is a great choice for SMBs seeking a powerful NAS appliance that won’t take up much space. Qnap also offers extra peace of mind as it is committed to making the TS-h765eU available and supported up to 2031.

Qnap TS-h765eU review specifications