The QNAP TS-253D may not be included in our best NAS for home round-up (because it loses out to the Synology DiskStation DS920+), but you shouldn't overlook it when discounted. The most important factor with buying a NAS is value and the TS-253D offers impressive specs at this lower Cyber Monday price.
As well as the two-bay TS-253D, two other QNAP NAS are on sale right now with four and six drive bays. Depending on what you want to do with the enclosure, you may find the 253D a better deal than the 653D, saving you money in the process.
Inside the attractive black chassis is an Intel Celeron J4125 CPU, which is more than powerful enough for handling even more intense NAS tasks like surveillance and even Plex Media Server. This processor is joined by 4GB of DDR4 RAM, which can be upgraded to a total of 8GB, and the two drive bays allow you to configure the enclosure with up to 32TB of capacity.
Using the excellent QNAP QTS 5.0 OS, it's possible to get up and running in just a few minutes. While it's possible to go up to 32TB, we recommend running the two drives (and you should really buy two) in a RAID configuration to protect yourself against data loss. The drawback is this will cut the total capacity by half.
If you do want to create your own media streaming platform with Plex, we recommend getting Plex Pass, which unlocks various features including hardware trasncoding support, which this CPU is good for.
This NAS is perfect for the home and makes a good first enclosure, but if it's not quite what you're after we're constantly updating our best Cyber Monday NAS deals hub with new deals as they go live.
