The Best 3-bay NAS Servers

The manufacturer QNAP is the only one that currently markets NAS servers with 3 bays for hard drives, its competitors such as Synology, ASUSTOR or Thecus, do not have models with this characteristic so important to mount a RAID 5, and that does not take us over any bay. Until the arrival of the following NAS servers, we had servers with 2 bays and with 4 or more bays, but we never had anything “intermediate” with 3 disk bays.

QNAP TS-328

This NAS QNAP brand has 3 bays for hard drives and is a great option if you are looking for a RAID 5 compatible NAS. Its main features are:

• It has a Realtek RTD 1296 ARM Cortex-A53 64-bit CPU with four 1.4 GHz cores, incorporates AES-NI hardware encryption to encrypt and decrypt data as quickly as possible, and also has Full HD hardware transcoding.
• It has 2 GB of non-expandable DDR4 RAM
• It has an internal flash memory of 4 GB.
• Supports the following hard drive formats:
  • 3.5 SATA3 hard drives
  • 2.5 SATA3 hard drives
  • 2.5 SATA3 SSD drives
• The connections available are: 2 USB 3.0 ports, 1 USB 2.0 port and 2 Gigabit Ethernet ports with Link Aggregation and Jumbo Frames support.
• As audio outputs it has, 1 integrated speaker, and a 3.5mm jack audio output.
• It has a consumption of 7.24 W in hard disk hibernation and 18.35 W in operation.

If you are looking for a NAS server with 3 bays to configure a RAID 5, this model is highly recommended considering its technical characteristics.

QNAP TS-351

This NAS server also has 3 bays for hard drives, but it has a much more powerful hardware than the previous model.

• It has a 64-bit Intel Celeron J1800 CPU with two cores at 2.41 GHz and in turbo mode up to 2.58 GHz, with hardware accelerated transcoding at a Full HD 1080p resolution. It incorporates an Intel HD Graphics GPU.
• It has 4 GB of DDR3L RAM, although it can be expanded up to 8 GB thanks to its 2 slots.
• It has an internal flash memory of 512 MB.
• Bays 1 and 2 support a SATA2 speed of 3 Gbps, Bay 3 supports SATA3 with a speed of 6Gbps.
• Supports the following hard drive formats:
  • 3.5 SATA hard drives
  • 2.5 SATA hard drives
  • 2.5 SATA SSD drives
  • It has 2 slots for M.2 NVMe SSD with a speed of up to 500 MB / s.
• The connections available are: 1 USB 3.0 port, 2 USB 2.0 ports and 1 Gigabit Ethernet port.
• It has an HDMI 1.4a video output with a maximum resolution of 1080P.
• As audio outputs it has, 1 integrated speaker, and a 3.5mm jack audio output.
• It has a consumption of 18.56 W in hard disk hibernation and 26.22 W in operation.

The highlight of this model is the incorporation of 2 M.2 NVMe slots to install SSD, this will allow us to accelerate the performance of the NAS when we are transferring small files, since we can use them as SSD or Qtier cache. If you are looking for a NAS server with two slots for M.2 SSD, and a total of 3 bays for hard drives, this model is very interesting.

QNAP TS-332X

This model also has a total of 3 bays to accommodate hard drives inside, but the main difference with the previous one, is that it has an SFP + port at a speed of 10Gbps, so that the wired data interface itself does not make bottleneck.

• It has an AnnapurnaLabs Alpine AL-324 quad-core CPU at 1.7GHz, has a 64-bit architecture and hardware encryption engine.
• It has 4 GB of DDR4 RAM, although it can be expanded to 16 GB.
• It has an internal flash memory of 512 MB.
• Supports the following hard drive formats:
  • 3.5 SATA3 hard drives
  • 2.5 SATA3 hard drives
  • 2.5 SATA3 SSD drives
  • It has 3 slots SATA3 for M.2 SSD
• The connections available are: 3 USB 3.0 ports, 2 Gigabit Ethernet ports with Link Aggregation support, and also has 1 10GbE SFP + port.
• As audio outputs it has 1 built-in speaker, and a 3.5mm jack audio output.
• It has a consumption of 18.56 W in hard disk hibernation and 26.22 W in operation.

If you are looking for a NAS server with three slots for M.2 SSD to use SSD cache and also Qtier, and, in addition, 1 port 10 GbE SFP + to transfer data at maximum speed, this model is highly recommended, since we will not have the bottleneck of the previous model.

Conclusions

In the NAS market there are few models that we can find with 3 hard disk bays, currently QNAP is the only manufacturer that has launched this type of devices, although it is possible that soon more manufacturers will be encouraged to do so, since Having a RAID 5 is almost essential on a NAS server. These three models that we have put you are the best options that you can find today (and the only ones), with special attention on the last two models.