QNAP TVS-h1288X 12-bay NAS Review

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SDLeary

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@Patrick

You seemed really enthusiastic about the Thunderbolt on the NAS! You could also use something like THIS so that you don't have to be so close with that M1 Mac!

And you mentioned in the video how Synology is essentially an "older" level of hardware at this point. Any rumblings from them about possibly rising to the challenge? This isn't the first generation of product that QNAP has bested them on (they have had Thunderbolt for a while too).
 
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marcoi

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in interested in one of these nas running QuTS Hero ZFS . I currently have a dell r720 with 256GB ram running truenas as a VM in my home lab. I have an external SM HDD JBOD case for my 3.5 HDD which i am using about 11 8tB WD shunked drives in. I have 6 hus ssd 100GB drives in the dell 2.5 slots that are used for zil, 2 per pool. All the drives are on raid cards in IT mode pass through to VM. No issues with truenas or performance, but the noise and heat starting to get to me. the SM case even with the SQ PSU is loud and the dell idles loud. Anyways i am thinking of replacing the dell/sm combo for a NAS. My assumption is the NAS will provide comparable performance but be less loud and generate less heat.
Cost is no longer an issue, though i try to buy smart. I could sell my current setup minus the HDDs to pay for a large portion of the new NAS. I would like to use the WD drives, assuming they will work (anyone try this?) and probably get a few 2.5 SSD and m2 drives for caching on new NAS. I would bump the memory upto 128 if it not that bad to do so. I already moved to 10GB nbase-t switch with 4 sfp+ ports so i have connectivity all set.

I havent played with the nas OS, i looked for a demo and qnap only has other OS available online, so i dont know all the features of the OS. You can only learn so much from online reviews.

So my questions are:
1. Is the Nas way easier to setup and use vs truenas OS?
2. Is the NAS quieter then a server that mostly idling and a SM 2U JBOD case?
3. Can i use shunked WD drives in the nas?
4. would you decided on nas vs DIY build if cost wasnt important? IE build custom server to be quiet and use trunas vs turn key nas solution.
5. Does the nas have a good Windows OS backup, not jsut file sync but disk imaging and restoring aka like Windows Server Essentials built in backup.

Thanks for any help.
 

Patrick

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@SDLeary Totally, but this helps save $300 on the other hand which is a lot if you have four people using it. Then again, this is not 100% practical for everyone.

The Synology folks seem pretty set using older hardware and then expanding into drives.

@marcoi I think my mother could setup a QNAP but would have a low likelihood of success with TrueNAS. It is probably quieter. I did not see any drive restrictions.

On the DIY side, to me, I totally get the value of these pre-built boxes. In many ways, they are less flexible, but there is an aspect to it which is really just unboxing something and going with it and not having to think about it.

On the backup - my best advice is to just search for what you need. These have some fairly substantial documentation and are high volume so if you are looking for an exact feature, best to just search and see.
 
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BoredSysadmin

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I personally upgraded QNAP hardware for SMB clients. The process couldn't be any humanly simpler.
Just swap hard drives from one to another, keeper the order. THAT'S IT.
The new device kept ALL of the settings, installed apps, and of course data. I didn't have to correct or change anything, not file shares, network info, or a native cloud backup setup.

As much as I love QNAP for Personal/Soho/SMB cases until they could match the level of support iXsystems provides (which I could personally attest as their paid customer is great), I'd recommend iXsystems storage as second-tier storage over Qnap/Synology every time.

As far as these units price, I agree with Patrick- these are well-engineered machines using modern and high-performing parts, but hard to shake off the feeling that the prices are a bit too high. I am not saying that the alternative is to roll my own NAS, but feels like QNAP as the sole provider of NAS with modern hardware has cornered this particular NAS market corner all by itself and free to set its own prices. Maybe if Synology, Asus, Netgear, Buffalo, WD, and Lenovo would update their NAS models maybe we would some healthier competition, but given how still relatively small the NAS market is I highly doubt it.
I give you an example that is close to me:
Subwoofers - A very well-made internet direct company Subwoofer starts around $800-1000. To make your own sub including, the wood, driver, amp, possibly some DSP module and its nice-looking finish would likely cost very similar, maybe savings of a couple of hundreds, but that still doesn't take into account the required tools. Some bigger savings could come if you build monster-sized subs and more typically pair or more.
On the other hand, building your own DIY NAS (especially from used parts) could be drastically cheaper (typically sacrificing noise and power) - I mean not crazy to build a high-performing 12 bay NAS using an old HP DL380G8 server parts well under $500. A comparable performing unit from QNAP would be easily 3-4 times the cost.
 
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marcoi

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I agree on pricing being high. Just components at todays rates i estimate about 1800 range on high end, no drives though. So the qnap is 800-1000 more (12 vs 16 bay unit) over hardware. I'm researching alternatives as well. If the qnap dropped 1k or came with 128GB ram it might be worth the current price.
 
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Patrick

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@BoredSysadmin As much as I know from the stats that STH has millions of readers, and most of them would know about something like a dl380 g8, I also know there are a lot of people that would just spend the money to not have to know how to build one's own. That experience you mention is worth a premium for some.
 
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marcoi

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marcoi

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so i decided to get a TVS-h1688X-W1250-32G, which is the 16 bay unit. I also ordered a 2 TB Samsung Evo plus m.2 drive. I was able to get both for around 3k shipped. I will test with 32GB ram and upgrade as needed.

My plan is to sell off my dell r720 and SM JBOD to cover about 50-60% of the cost of the unit. Since i am redesigning my home lab, i will have two home build servers that are quiet and have e-2186G and e-2286G cpu, each with 64GB ram. They will run my home prod VMs. I estimate each to idle around 100W, so with the new QNAP my lab should be around 3-400 watts vs 6-800 watts. Also i will keep my r730 offline and power it up only when doing projects for work, thus saving on noise and power. I also ordered new fans for my dell 8024 switch that should lower the noise as well. If i have time, ill write something up in another post on how everything plays out.

Thanks to STH for making me spend more money ;)
 

rafale77

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I have been watching/monitoring this unit ever since it was first announced with a lot of interest. I have been a longtime (and happy) QNAP user myself and really appreciated the ease of setup and convenience of their OS. It should be noted that the price of this model suddenly went up by $500 a few months ago and made be balked at purchasing one.
I have also been sensing a change towards arrogance in their management with the increasing tendency to want to require a license (both subscription and permanent) for everything, many of them being open-sourced software adapted to their platform, refusal to acknowledge/respond to problems (example an abnormally high failure rate of x72 model motherboards), and very questionable firmware quality. I am now looking for an alternative between Asus and building something on my own for 3-4X less or 3-4X more powerful with freenas or proxmox.
 

marcoi

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well my unit arrives today. I pulled some SSD from my other server that i will use to fill the 4 bay 2.5 and i also have the 1 m.2 drive. That will let me play with the unit under my new lab build out. I am hoping to reduce the work needed to maintain a server/truenas combo with my current setup. Once done testing, ill bring down my old setup and move over the 12 8TB drives and build out my storage area.
 

marcoi

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Well its been a few months with the TVS-h1688X-W1250-32G unit and i have to say i regret buying it. The hardware seems nice but the software sucks. I have like 30 plus tickets with Qnap support on various issues with the software. I also been dealing with one pool having cksum errors showing up and they cant figure out why. the drives were in the truenas prior without issues, so its something to do with unit/OS.

Apps for backup, especially Hyper Data protect, which backs up VMs, has failed on the last two updates. So i am exposed with my VMs not having a backup at the moment. I had virtual station VMs cause the unit to stop responding. The unit insists on using the slower 2.5GB links for data when i have 10GB in LACP setup.

I know i had problems with my server and truenas, but nothing like this. I feel like the software is being beta tested on users.

Anyways for future user thinking about getting this unit, i would really consider knowing what you are getting into with software side as its not the best at the moment.
 

BoredSysadmin

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It's been a year since I bought a used QNAP TVS-x72XT from eBay, and I feel very disillusioned by my previous strong belief in the brand. I knew going in that Qnap's software quality/polish is far from ideal, but I considered myself techie enough to deal with it, and to be honest, for the most part, I did. Even then QTS 5.0 update and its new version of Container station majorly broke most of my existing containers network. I reconfigured the container's network to avoid a broken bridge config and switched to nat, which worked.

What I was not prepared for at all was a sudden and complete DEATH of my NAS, and it seems I am far from the only one affected by this:
Rumor is that the issue lies with the motherboard's PCH B360 chip. I've raised the qnap support ticket only to hear horrible news:
Even with 1-year warranty extension, the NAS still is out of warranty, and The repair cost would be a whopping $750 (adding a "free" 180 days warranty). They offered me a minor discount toward a new qnap so that I might consider that as another option :(


Right now, I'm proper ducked. Like the hare from "Snatch" movie. Unless I replace the nas with another QTS running QNAP, my data recovery would be excruciating and slow, but spending more money on QNAP is to say, at least, that isn't my priority right now.

So to summarize, I had bad experiences with both Synology and Qnap. Recommended Truenas mini to a friend that died due to an Atom C2000k bug - luckily, iXSystems took care of it, and it wasn't their fault, to begin with. No one has a perfect track record.
Maybe I need to rethink this and go back to the DIY home server as I did before...
 

marcoi

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@BoredSysadmin - My experience hasn't been as bad as yours with my unit. The hardware is fairly good. Their software needs help, and they seem to use the end users for testing it out. Knock on wood, I haven't had to open any new software issue cases with Qnap in a while. I am running QTS Hero 5.0.1 release candidate. So far so good.

As for your issues, i don't know if you got Qnap VM ( QuTScloud (qnap.com) ) if you can pass through the drives to it to try to recover your data. This assumes you have hardware to hook up the drives too and can run virtualized system IE ESXI, Hyper-v etc..

If you still have support option with Qnap, maybe you can ask them if that works. Or you can pay the 5 dollars to get 1 month of licensing for QuTS cloud VM and experiment. I'm not sure if you had been running QTS hero if you could take the ZFS raid to another platform to get your data out. IE Truenas etc..

I don't know if you tried any of the extreme hardware repairs or if you are even comfortable doing so? I dont know if the issue with chipset is the chip itself dying or if its something like excessive heat caused the solder to get lose and baking the board may help it reflow..

Not sure if any of this helps, but i hope your recovery goes well.
 
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BoredSysadmin

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Thanks, @marcoi . I will look further into QuTS cloud, but from an initial view, it seems you need on-prem qnap nas to mount the storage to the cloud device, not just a raw hard drive, at least according to this gif. I don't mind paying a few dollars, but I am not sure it would be helpful. Now, things may be different if I could run QTS on my hypervisor as a VM. I haven't tried re-backing the board, but the comments on a link I listed mentioned said that re-soldering the chip didn't help. It needs a brand-new pch chip. Not sure where to source one.
 
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marcoi

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@BoredSysadmin here is the link to download the software for whatever platform ie ESXI
QuTScloud - Download Center | QNAP (US)


Yeah i see from the thread it seems to be a perma death of the chipset or something along with cpu. I dont know if anyone posted trying to remove the memory and cpu, trying to post the motherboard and seeing if it beeps etc. Sometimes reseating the cpu and memory can fix weird issues like that. If you have time to test that it may be worth a shot. If it still dead after testing, then i would agree its an issue with design/chipset.

Also have you tried using social media to get more attention to the issue? Sometime the social media side can push the support side to change their mind. QNAP Systems, Inc. (@QNAP_nas) / Twitter
 
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