Frustration with QNAP and expansion bay (TR-004U). Is this normal?

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bateau

Member
Jan 22, 2017
49
14
8
My setup: TS-431XeU and a TR-004, used as shared NFSv3 store for 2 ESXi servers.
(I'm stuck with wallmount racks, so can only use short depth devices)

My deceptions with this setup:
  • the extension bay (TR-004U) is NOT integrated at all with the main unit software:
    • RAID spanning the main unit and the expansion bay is impossible.
    • Individual disks on the expansion unit is impossible, unless you set the dip switches on the expansion unit to "individual"
    • Disk I/O statistics are not available on any disk in the expansion bay (when dip switches are set to "individual", don't know about the other options)
  • Priority controlled network failover between the 1G and the 10G links is not possible. LACP is possible though, but that does not give you priority control.
  • Whenever you insert a disk in the expansion bay, the entire expansion bay loses connectivity temporarily (halting any VM that uses one of the disks there)
  • Extremely long reboot time, close to 10 minutes.
  • The expansion bay trays have a plastic insulation in the tray, that is absent in the main NAS trays. Without the insulation they look they are prone to provoke shorts on the disks.
So sorry I went for QNAP. Big deception.
Is this normal?

PS: MAYBE related to the last issue: I've had 2 new He12 disks in the main unit showing intermittent I/O issues, to finally stop working. RMA'ing them now. Will see how that turns out.
 

EngChiSTH

Active Member
Jun 27, 2018
108
45
28
Chicago
Honestly , I think at least some of it is buyers remorse and if you dont like it as much just return it , get your money back and try something else. This has little to do with QNAP and definitely has nothing to do with 'deception'. you are free to spend your money anyway you like and should get something that works for you...

as far as item by item

- expansion bay , my understanding is that this is how all of them work (Synology, QNAP ,etc). you can add it to add more storage to the system overall, you can create RAID on the external drives, however you can not create RAID that mixes internal and external drives or pools. Think about it - the bandwidth is clearly insufficient for that.. usb 3.1 gen 1 bandwidth is 5 Gb/sec, 4 drives at 6Gb/sec each = 24 Gb/sec - how do you think this single cable would support that much traffic if needed? it wouldn't...

- the rest are software questions which you are right to bring to QNAP. 'help me understand' type of requests and then learning

- long(er) reboot times , yes that is normal. remember you are dealing with specialized ARM CPU that is meant for one and only one thing which is low power operations supporting storage services.

I have QNAP 332X for the last 3+ years with 3 HDDs + M2 for cache . zero concerns for what it is supposed to be (NAS). I dont run containers (have proxmox cluster for any virtualization support) on it or PLEX (nvidia shield tv) or DLNA applications or anything else. it is serving storage, backing itself up to attached USB drive, to secondary NAS, and to cloud (google drive in my case). everything works and just runs. I used it for iscsi support, use NFS shares that network devices use (and virtualization cluster too), have SMB shares for various needs, backup Veeam to it, etc. just works and very stable.

if you are not happy , get your money back and try something else , or roll our own (truenas core, etc).
 

QNAPDaniel

New Member
Sep 17, 2021
3
1
3
The TR-004 and TR-004U in general, are lower-performing compared to other QNAP expansion units.
None of the QNAP expansion units will let you span a single RAID group between NAS and the expansion unit. For the TS-431X the TL-D800C is higher performance and at least allows RAID expansion so that you could add an individual disk pool and later expand it. But the Expansion unit still needs to be a different storage pool than the NAS. Assuming the TS-431X is on a shelf on your rack, perhaps the TL-D800C could also fit on a shelf.

On some higher-end QNAPs there are units that can take 1 or more TL-R1220Sep-RP which should allow you to combine NAS and expansion on a single volume and storage pool. Also, TS-431X may not perform well for iSCSI because of the lower-powered ARM CPU. How much performance do you need?

QNAPs do have a long reboot time. But usually, you would not reboot very often.

It looks like the QNAP won't do everything you want. But QNAP does have products that perform much better than the TS-431X and TR-004.