New Qnap NAS launch with USB4 connectivity and E1.S bays

During its Qnap World Tour event in Germany, the networking specialist briefly announced three new NAS systems intended primarily for video production. The devices can function as both NAS and DAS, or Direct Attached Storage. The TS-hx56X series provides two USB4 ports for this purpose. Direct access to the storage should therefore be significantly faster than over multigigabit Ethernet or even 10GbE. Specifications remain limited, as the manufacturer only briefly showed the systems on a slide. Still, the slide revealed the configurations Qnap has planned.

All three systems are desktop NAS devices, with four, six or eight SATA interfaces for conventional high-capacity hard drives or SSDs, which should offer responsive performance even over SATA. The two E1.S slots are intended for fast data ingestion using blade-style SSDs. However, equipping them will likely be expensive. While the E1 standard has been around for some time, available drives primarily target the enterprise and server markets. As a result, these SSD blades are rarely available at affordable prices.

Whether that will change anytime soon remains unclear, although Qnap's TS-hx56X series could help make the format more popular. Samsung's PM93A has been available in the E1.S format for some time, including in lower capacities such as 2TB. However, these blades are difficult to find in German-speaking markets and are primarily sold for specific data center projects. Further details are still pending, as Qnap plans to release these NAS systems "soon".