In quick answer to the question of “is VM on a NAS something you'd use?” - Yes, My N40L Microserver runs 4 Light VMs for doing a variety of stuff - including learning about VMs!

Thanks for a good review. I've progressed from the original Terastation (ran out of room, plus the drives are not directly readable in a PC) to the Tranquil SQA-5H (nice but didn't have the oomph to transcode 4 HD streams) to a dedicated i5-3570T PC (OK but subject to usual PC problems, fans failing etc). So I'm really interested in this. Do you know, if I just drop my data drives into it, will it integrate them or insist on wiping them? I'll go and Google it and report back sometime if I find the answer.

Although the specification says 8GB RAM max it actually supports 16GB! I haven't tried it myself but according to multiple users from QNAP user forum (I can't post the link because a don't have enough posts). This applies to TS-451 as well!

Excellent review, thanks. So good in fact I just had to buy one :)

I'd stay away…got sick of ringing QNAP support and having a tech do exactly what I had done already and then declaring the array toast “because there was an error on another drive it didn't notice”

I was 1/6 on successful rebuilds after a failed disk with QNAP NASes.

On synology units it was ~ 20/20