Unboxing the QNAP TS-464 felt like upgrading from a bicycle to a Tesla. The pre-installed Seagate IronWolf drives humming in RAID 5 configuration immediately gave me confidence - no more DIY RAID anxiety. Those 12TB stared back at me like a vault waiting to be filled.

The real magic happened when I discovered this isn't some walled-garden NAS. On a whim, I wiped QTS and installed Proxmox - something I'd never dare try with Synology. The metal chassis practically purred as it handled my virtual machines, its quad-core CPU barely breaking a sweat.

Network performance? Game changing. Moving my 4K video edits across the dual 2.5GbE ports feels like using an enterprise system - no more coffee breaks during file transfers. Though I wish QNAP had included a tiny fan for the PCIe slot; my networking card gets warmer than I'd like during marathon Plex sessions.

Here's the kicker nobody mentions: It secretly supports 64GB RAM despite official specs saying 16GB max. My Crucial 32GBx2 kit slotted in perfectly, turning this into a virtualization beast that laughs at my Docker containers and Windows VMs.

The only real pain point? USB backups occasionally miss files mysteriously. But for everything else - from serving lossless audio to my home theater to backing up family memories - this silver box has become the silent guardian of my digital life.