QNAP QuTS hero Turbo Station TS-873A-8G, 8GB RAM, 2x RJ-45 2.5GBase-T, 3x USB-A 3.1

If you are a fan of NAS storage or are in the market for a solid piece of desktop data storage hardware, then there is a good chance that you have been looking at 8-Bay solutions. Arguably, at this capacity of storage (both in network-accessible and/or direct accessible varieties) that things get series. Serious considerations for surveillance, virtualization, expandability and upgradability all become dealbreakers for buyers and although this is not the first 8 HDD system that QNAP has released, it has to be said that this is potentially one of the most mature releases I have seen from the brand in quite a few years. In the past we have typically found solutions that were incredibly powerful, hardware heavy but expensive or solutions that were affordable but underpowered, leading to early disappointment. The new TS-873A is very much a different beast, as it promises a much better middle ground than solutions that came before, as well as still managing to provide hardware options that are simply not available on rival solutions. So, is this new 8-Bay solution just another NAS system that gets lost in the noise, or is it something that genuinely breaks the mould? Perhaps somewhere in between? Let’s find out if the QNAP TS-873A NAS deserves your data?

I know I have said this like 10x in the review, but I genuinely respect how mature and focused the TS-873A is, especially when compared with a number of more ‘throw as much hardware as possible at it’ based 8-Bay devices are available from QNAP in their portfolio. A much better balance of internal and external hardware result in a system that feels significantly more capable of business that most devices that the brand have produced in the last 12 months. Add to this that the TS-873A arrives with the QNAP QuTS Hero ZFS platform and you have a system that will tick ALOT of boxes for both novice NAS buyers and more worldly data storage experts. Seemingly taking a leaf out of the books of Synology and their DS1821+ in terms of keeping it straight forward, this solutions sits very well in the portfolio.