Jargon alert. A NAS is a network attached storage device. An OOBE is an out of box experience.
My rocky experience with the internal and external OWC solid state storage devices has led me to look at network attached storage. In the early aughts, I started with Buffalo and Drobo, and had bad experiences with both. I switched to Synology, and had tens years of great results with them. But Synology made it difficult to impossible to run third-party disks in their enterprise level boxes, and a year or so ago I started using QNAP. Aside from the failure of a redundant power supply, my QNAP box has been running like a hound, so I was biased in their direction.
I wanted a NAS with at least 32 TB of usable flat storage, hot sparing, 10 GbE network connection, and RAID 6 and 10 options. The possibility of using M.2 SSD modules was attractive to me, and I toyed with the idea of getting the Asustor 12 NAS, and filling it with 4 TB modules. But reading about some compatibility issues with arrays of that size put me off, and I settled for a NAS that took 6 Gb/s SATA drives. The QNAP TS-932PX-4G filled the bill. A few salient features:
- 2 10 Gb/s SFP+ ports
- 4 2.5 inch bays
- 5 3.5 inch bays
I would have preferred an all-2.5-inch NAS, but I could work with this one. I planned to fill it with 9 8 TB Samsung 870 QVO SATA III 2.5″ SSDs. 8 TB M.2 modules are expensive, but these SATA drive are cheap. They’re quad-level, so I’d want to configure in some redundancy, but that’s easy to do with the QNAP NAS.
It wasn’t hard to install 5 SSDs in the 3.5 inch QNAP NAS drive bays, but I was only able to use three screws in each SSD. Installing the SSDs in the 2.5 inch sled was a piece of cake; they just snapped right in.
I powered up the NAS, and ran the installation wizard. One of the first things was to update the firmware.
I created an 8-drive RAID 6 array, leaving one SSD as a hot spare.
The system is running fairly cool, and the fan is quiet. This in not an enterprise-level box, and It doesn'[t have enterprise-level noise.
I started transferring data to the new volume, getting transfer rates of just under 400 MB/s.
After half an hour or so, trouble reared its head:
The number 2 disk was MIA:
The system had swapped in SSD 4, which had been the hot spare.
I reseated the #2 drive. After five or ten minutes, the #4 drive dropped out.
I reseated that one, too.
Then #3 went AWOL.
I reseated that one, too. Then I started tests for each of the reseated drives, and told the system to rebuild the array.
The next morning the rebuild had finished. I decided to start all over again. But the NAS wouldn’t let me delete the volume or the disk pool.
I looked around on the web and found a way to get back to square 1:
That worked. When I plugged the SSDs back in the system recognized them as previously used.
I said go ahead and do a clean installation, and was rewarded by this:
Hoping to improve write performance, I set up the array as 8 SSDs in a RAID 10 and one hot spare.
I started transferring data to the new array. After about 15 minutes, one of the SSDs dropped out, and was replaced by the hot spare.
I reseated the SSD.
And a long rebuild continued.
Yesterday, I was prepared to believe that I hadn’t seated some of the drive sleds properly. Now I don’t think that’s the issue. I suspect when the array is rebuilt and I star populating it with data again, I’ll see another SSD drop out.
The QNAP compatibility list is short and old. The drives I’m using aren’t on it.
The next day, the rebuild had completed. I started a single GoodSync transfer of data (before I’d used two at the same time). For a almost 10 hours and 3 or 4 TB of data transferred, things went well:
But then a drive dropped out:
I reseated the drive and made it a spare. I let the new rebuild continue.
I think the Samsung drives I’m using are incompatible with the NAS.
I tried one more thing. I set GoodSync to only have four files open at a time, instead of 10. The transfers didn’t slow down much. The transfer ran for 5 or 6 hours, then failed with one of the SSD drive dropping out.
I give up. I’m going to try to build a hybrid system with Toshiba hard disks and SanDisk SSDs. More on that in the next post.
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