Synonymous with high-quality NAS appliances for many years, QNAP continues to innovate in the field with forward-thinking solutions. At Computex, the enterprise manufacturer unveiled an all-flash NAS equipped with Thunderbolt 4. Enter the TBS-574TX.
Following on from the TBS-574X announced at CES in January, this device builds on the specification. There’s support for five hot-swappable NVMe ES1 or standard M.2 SSDs. The latter is great as drives have become incredibly inexpensive of late.
Being hot-swappable on the ES1, this not only saves costly time when introducing a new drive into the system, but also aids tremendously in configuring and troubleshooting RAID-array setups.
The box of tricks also arrives in either 12th Gen Intel Core i5-1250PE and Intel Core i3-1220PE CPU flavours with max boost speeds of 4.2GHz and 4.4GHz, respectively. These chips are mated to 8GB or 16GB of onboard LPDDR4X memory.
QNAP has outfitted this version with plenty of appealing I/O sockets and ports to stick your fingers in – I’m kidding, don’t do that. In the rear you will find two RJ45 network ports, comprising of one 10GbE connection and the other a 2.5GbE variant.
USB ports are plentiful, too. There are two USB 3.2 Gen2 Type A ports – one in the front and the rear – a single USB 2.0 Type-A also in the rear, and two blistering-fast Thunderbolt 4 40Gbps ports that are also featured up front and in the back. Finally, you get a single HDMI 1.4b port for UI interfacing, and a barrel-styled 12V power connection for the 120W power adapter.
You would think that this would make for a rather large device, but it measures only 215 x 199 x 60mm and weighs a sultry 2.24kg. QNAP even managed to fit two rear fans and an integrated heatsink for cooling, making it impressive for the size; trust us, the images just don’t do it justice.
As expected, there’s no official release date or pricing available, but we’ll be sure to keep our eyes peeled for this one. After speaking to QNAP representatives out in Computex, chances are it may arrive in market Q3 2023. One for media professionals who want to access their storage at alarmingly fast rates, QNAP reckons the TBS-574TX is good for a sustained 1,500MB/s read and write.
