QNAP has announced the TS-h966TX, a compact Thunderbolt 4 NAS designed to accelerate content creation workflows. Thanks to its hybrid drive layout, the TS-h966TX lets you take advantage of SATA hard drives with their comparatively lower cost per terabyte, while maintaining high transfer speeds and fast access with SSD caching. Meanwhile, it’s Thunderbolt 4 interface enables high-speed access directly from your computer.
The TS-h966TX is targeting small studios and creators looking for a cost-effective storage setup that can help turn round projects fast. To achieve this, QNAP equipped it with five 3.5in SATA HDD drive bays, plus four 2.5in U.2 PCIe NVMe bays. The former takes care of long-term high-capacity storage, while the latter is used as a high-speed SSD storage pool or cache to accelerate HDD access.
Those needing more storage capacity can install the brand’s USB4 JBOD expansion units, such as the TL-D810TC4, giving you the flexibility to upgrade capacity as you go. Adding external drives via USB is also possible.
To ensure data flows aren’t bottlenecked, QNAP has equipped this NAS with two Thunderbolt 4 ports, plus two LAN ports running at 10Gb/s and 2.5Gb/s. This means you can hook it up to your high-speed network, while also having a high-speed connection for when you need to access your massive storage array quickly – you just need a Thunderbolt 4-equipped PC or Mac.
Note, however, that unlike the TVS-hx77AX, this model doesn’t offer any PCIe expansion slots, meaning you are stuck with what you have. On the plus side, the TS-h966TX is also more compact than the aforementioned device, measuring just 182.7 x 224.6 x 223.6mm, which makes it 36% smaller than QNAP’s previous 6-bay HDD-based Thunderbolt 4 NAS models.
Under the hood, the TS-h966TX is powered by a 6-core Intel Core i3 processor clocked to 4.4GHz, coupled to 8GB of SODIMM DDR5 memory, which you can upgrade to 64GB. Once more, QNAP is using its ZFS-based QuTS hero operating system, offering enterprise-class data integrity, WORM (write-once, read many) technology, and SSD-optimised performance for professionals who require both speed and reliability. It also supports myQNAPcloud One cloud storage, which enables off-site data backups.
In terms of I/O, you get the aforementioned dual Thunderbolt 4 ports, plus dual LAN (10GbE + 2.5GbE) alongside two USB 3.2 10Gb/s ports, one USB 2.0 socket, and one HDMI output for monitoring.
The QNAP TS-h966TX Thunderbolt 4 NAS is available for £1,588 / €1,664, backed by a three-year warranty, which can be expanded up to five years.
