Any good?

QNAP are an extremely good NAS manufacturer. The spec is a dual core Atom D425 1.8 GHz and 512mb of ram which will be fine to do what you want. 4 HDD slots is nice but you’ll not need them all. As long as you aren’t worried about continuity a single drive is fine. However many drives you have you will be backing up the data – won’t you? So add the cost of a USB drive to anything you buy.

The T439 Pro II is a 2009 model so if the HDD is of that vintage too I’d recommend replacing it.

As you probably know I favour Synology boxes. £155 buys you a Synology DS115j DiskStation 1-Bay NAS w/ 1x 2TB Seagate IronWolf Hard Drive from Broadbandbuyer Synology page here  (Seagate IronWolf and WD Red are the specialist NAS HDDs with 3 year warranty).

Looking at the QNAP Photostation and the Synology Photo Station they go about their business in much the same way.

Here’s a link to a photo of Michelle and Harriet outside a cafe in Bruges from one of my albums on my Synology. This is openly shared to the public but you can do it via all sorts of social media or shared albums with specific permissions and / or passwords.

So would I but the QNAP? Probably not as for the same money I can buy new kit that will do the same job.

EDIT – Alan that’s a stock photo, it has 4 slots but only 1 drive.

This is a “proper” server operating system so works on the idea of users and permissions – they make it very easy though! It’s pretty much all tick box stuff.

An example, when you create a new user you’ll be shown a list of the installed applications and those they have access to by default are ticked. You just tick any you want them to have access to that they don’t. The same applies to File Shares and similar things.

You install applications through Package Center and just click the Install button on the one(s) you want. It then becomes available available on the Main Menu (if you have permissions to use it). Icons can be dragged from the Main Menu to your own desktop.

“Top level” Shared Folders are created in Control Panel, everything else file wise is done in File Station.

Apps like Photo Station and Video Station will automatically create their own top level shared folder structures and user groups for you.

Just give me a shout if you have any questions. Don’t be afraid to have a go and make a mess of it. You can easily reset it all back to an out of the box state.