How-to Install an Unsupported PCIe Riser Card or Unsupported PCIe SSD/NVME in an X86/64 QNAP NAS Running QuTS hero

[sboesch]

I have a QNAP TS-873A 8x bay NAS, it’s been a workhorse for the last 4 years. I wanted to add a server-pulled Intel DC P3700 1.6TB PCIe 3 x4 card for virtual machines and containers since the two built in NVME slots only run at PCIe 3 1x.
Popped the card in, went to create a new volume and boo hiss, the card is not supported and can only be used for ZIL. After checking the hardware compatibility list on QNAP’s site, sure enough, not supported, the only PCIe x4 flash they support is their own branded flash, which is ridiculously expensive and doesn’t have the TBW and features the Intel DC P3700 has.
Well, screw you Joe Boo, you don’t tell me, I tell you! This is obviously a software restraint, the QNAP QuTS hero OS is Linux, so this should be easy enough, and it was.

Change at your own risk!

Prerequisites:

• x86/64 QNAP running QuTS hero (your mileage may very on non-hero OS as I did not test this)
• Admin account on your QNAP NAS
• SSH Enabled on your QNAP NAS
• Your IP address or hostname of your QNAP NAS
• Unsupported flash device installed in your QNAP NAS, this will work with PCIe NVME riser cards and PCIe flash cards. Bifurcation is NOT supported!

Instructions:

• Install your flash
• SSH to your NAS with your admin account
• sudo vi /etc/hal.conf
• Find [Enclosure_23] and change the value of protocol = 5 to protocol = 9
• 
• Save and exit
• Reboot your QNAP NAS
• Create a new volume with your freshly enabled flash
  

QNAP determines that if it is its own branded card, it will set the protocol value to 9 allowing disk management to have full functionality. If QNAP determines that the device is not a QNAP branded device, it sets the protocol value to 5 and the drive can only be used for caching.

 

[amalurk]

Does this work across the regularly released QuTS updates?

 

[sboesch]

Does this work across the regularly released QuTS updates?

I don't see why not, it is now a system volume and in the Hardware Abstraction List. I was unable to find anyone else that did this.

 

[sboesch]

Does this work across the regularly released QuTS updates?

I just applied the latest firmware update and the unsupported flash device is still working.

 

[Patrick]

Very interesting. I think we have tried like 8-10 different types of SSDs in the TS-h1290fx. Maybe that is different with all different types of SSDs?

 

[sboesch]

Very interesting. I think we have tried like 8-10 different types of SSDs in the TS-h1290fx. Maybe that is different with all different types of SSDs?

I'd like to do further testing, unfortunately this NAS is offsite at the girlfriend's house, it's being used for cold backups, running DNS services and such. I'd be in the doghouse!

 

[FlameRed]

Hello!

This is a great thread. I attempted to replicate this same massive feat on a TVS-H874 running quts-hero5.3.

I found that after I edited /etc/hal.conf and changed the protocol=5 to 9, on the next boot it would change itself back to 5 again.

So I found another thread that indicated that if you build a Storage Pool on the SSD, it will stop changing protocol-5 back on reboot. So I built a storage pool and tried to reboot but it would not reboot. I finally pulled the plug.

I disconnected the SSD riser cable/card and rebooted and the QNAP came back up and I was able to delete the Storage pool even though it knew it was not present.

So I wanted to see if the riser cable/card could be used for cache. I removed the existing M.2 cache and plugged the Riser/Card back in after rebooting. But then I see that QNAP requires 2 M.2 for read/write cache and since the riser/card does not seem to support letting QNAP see both M.2 that are in there, the riser/card with two M.2 won't really do anything of use.

Any advice why I cannot seem to get this to work like the others?