Brands Guides About
QNAP TS-431K 4 Bay Home NAS 1GbE Ports — main product image
QNAP TS-431K 4 Bay Home NAS 1GbE Ports
QNAP TS-431K 4 Bay Home NAS 1GbE Ports
QNAP TS-431K 4 Bay Home NAS 1GbE Ports
QNAP TS-431K 4 Bay Home NAS 1GbE Ports
QNAP TS-431K 4 Bay Home NAS 1GbE Ports
QNAP TS-431K 4 Bay Home NAS 1GbE Ports
QNAP

QNAP TS-431K 4 Bay Home NAS 1GbE Ports

USB 3.2

Four-bay NAS with quad-core processing and dual GbE gives home networks a dedicated, always-on storage hub that outgrows single-drive solutions.

Check availability
Affiliate Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate, Studio Supplies earns from qualifying purchases made through links on this page, at no additional cost to you. This helps support our editorial team.

Notice a mistake? Let Us Know

Overview

The QNAP TS-431K is a four-bay NAS built around the Annapurna Labs AL-214 — a quad-core ARM processor running at 1.7 GHz that QNAP has deployed across several NAS generations for its balance of performance per watt and multi-threaded throughput. The 1GB DDR3 RAM is lean by current standards but sufficient for the device's intended home and light prosumer role. Four SATA 6Gb/s bays mean sequential drive throughput won't be the limiting factor; the dual 1GbE network ports set the practical ceiling at roughly 125 MB/s aggregate, which is enough for high-bitrate 4K media streaming and concurrent backup jobs over a standard gigabit home network. RAID 5 across four drives gives you the best balance of usable capacity and fault tolerance for this bay count.

The TS-431K is positioned for households and small offices that have outgrown single-drive external storage and need a reliable, always-on repository for documents, media libraries, and versioned backups. QNAP's QTS operating system adds depth — Plex Media Server, Hybrid Backup Sync for cloud offsite replication, and snapshot-based data protection are all available. The lockable drive trays and compact enclosure suit home office environments where physical security and minimal footprint matter. This is not a device for video editing workstations or virtualization-heavy workflows — the RAM ceiling makes those use cases constrained — but as a network-attached backup hub and media server, the TS-431K is a dependable, cost-effective foundation.

Key Features

Annapurna Labs AL-214 quad-core 1.7 GHz processor

1GB DDR3 RAM

2 x 1 GbE port

3 x USB 3.2 Gen 1 port

4 x 3.5-inch SATA 6Gb/s, 3Gb/s (Diskless)

Specifications

Processor
Annapurna Labs AL-214 Quad-Core 1.7 GHz
RAM
1GB DDR3 (fixed, non-upgradeable)
Drive Bays
4 x 3.5-inch SATA 6Gb/s, 3Gb/s (Diskless)
Network Ports
2 x 1 GbE
USB Ports
3 x USB 3.2 Gen 1
Model
TS-431K
Brand
QNAP

Frequently Asked Questions

The TS-431K accepts any 3.5-inch SATA drive running at 6Gb/s or 3Gb/s — it ships diskless, so you populate it with your own drives. QNAP maintains a hardware compatibility list, and most major desktop drives from WD, Seagate, and Toshiba are validated. Capacity per bay is constrained by whatever maximum capacity QNAP's firmware supports at the time, typically well beyond what consumer drives currently ship at.
The four-bay design supports JBOD, RAID 0, 1, 5, 6, and 10. RAID 5 — the most common choice for this class of device — gives you three drives' worth of usable capacity with single-drive fault tolerance. RAID 6 allows two simultaneous drive failures but costs you two drives' worth of capacity. RAID 0 maximizes raw throughput but offers zero redundancy, making it unsuitable for primary backup use.
For home use — file sharing, media streaming, and basic backup — 1GB DDR3 is functional. Under concurrent workloads such as running multiple virtual machines, heavy surveillance recording, or large simultaneous user connections, RAM becomes the bottleneck before the CPU or drives do. The AL-214 processor can handle the workload, but the fixed, non-upgradeable RAM constrains how many services you can run simultaneously.
Dual 1GbE ports provide a theoretical ceiling of 1 Gbps per connection (~125 MB/s), with real-world sequential transfers typically landing in the 110–115 MB/s range depending on drive speed and RAID configuration. Port trunking allows the two ports to be bonded for increased aggregate throughput to multiple simultaneous users, though single-client speeds remain capped at one port's bandwidth.
It can complement or partially replace cloud backup. QNAP's QTS operating system includes Hybrid Backup Sync, which supports local-to-local, local-to-cloud, and cloud-to-local backup jobs. The TS-431K itself is a single physical location, so for true disaster recovery, pairing it with an offsite cloud target (Amazon S3, Backblaze B2) remains best practice.

Related Products