5 Things to Know About the QNAP TS-873A’s Drive Bays and NVMe Slots

Eight SATA bays give the TS-873A high storage capacity. You can fill them with standard 3.5-inch or 2.5-inch SATA drives.

Two M.2 NVMe Gen 3 x4 slots provide full bandwidth for cache or a storage pool. Each slot uses four PCIe lanes, avoiding the QNAP bottleneck found on some competing NAS units.

The x4 lanes per M.2 slot are a meaningful advantage. Many larger NAS units starve their M.2 slots with fewer lanes, reducing performance.

Use the NVMe slots to accelerate frequently accessed data. They work well as a read or read-write cache for the main SATA pool.

You can also configure the NVMe drives as a separate high-speed storage pool. This setup is ideal for applications that demand low latency, like virtualization or databases.