NAS devices have come a long way in the past several years. What used to be a bunch of hard drives plugged into a motherboard with an Ethernet NIC and a power port, running a stripped down Linux kernel with a few fileshare services running has expanded to these comparative monstrosities with connectivity galore: USB ports, eSATA ports, multiple NICs, and now HDMI. A NAS isn’t so much a NAS any longer: it’s a multimedia computer not just suited for the office closet, but for the living room, as well.

The QNAP TS-469L, combined with QTS 4.0.1, wants to be in your living room. It wants to be your multimedia machine, storing the things you want to see on your television, be those things cast from your laptop, HTPC, or streaming device, or shown directly from the device itself.

In this review, we’ll go into light depth on many of the features of the QNAP TS-469L, but also QTS 4.0.1, as this is the first QNAP product review we’ve done since the overhauled firmware was released several weeks ago.