QNAP TS-932PX-4G NAS OOBE — trying for a hybrid system

The SSD-only NAS turned out to be unreliable. See the previous post for the gory details. I decided to try to build a hybrid system. I got 5 20 TB Toshiba enterprise spinning rust disks and a few SanDisk 3D 4TB SSDs. I took the Samsung SSDs out of the NAS and installed the Toshiba disks and one SanDisk SSD.

After initial configuration, I got a flock of serious-looking errors and interminable bleating from the box:

I filled out a request for trouble ticket on the QNAP website. Then I got this:

I figured that it might like the way I filled in the form. I messed around for about 10 minutes trying different things and finally found an error in the serial number. Once I corrected that, I was able to create a trouble ticket. Those fun loving programmers at QNAP must have figured out that the serial number was NFG, but wouldn’t tell be about it, instead giving me a generic “Something went wrong” message. I guess that provided some amusement to them, as well as cutting down on the number of trouble tickets that are successfully submitted.

I resumed troubleshooting on my own. I booted up the system with no drives installed, and performed clean configuration with only one Toshiba 20 TB drive.

No joy:

I unboxed another TS-932PX-4G and configured it with one Toshiba 20 TB drive. That worked fine. It allowed me a firmware update at configuration time, and another one after configuration, letting me get to a firmware release that the first QNAP NAS wouldn’t load.

 

I installed the other four Toshiba 20TB drives.

I left the SSDs that I will be using for caching out for the time being. I set up the first four drives as a RAID 10 (striped and mirrored), and made the fifth a hot spare.

The system synched the array in the background.

That time seems pretty pessimistic.  After a couple of hours it looked a bit better.

I started to populate the array:

 

So far, so good.

A day later, I had transferred about 14 TB of data with no errors. Towards the end of this operation, I got a lot of parallel transfers going to see if I could break the NAS. It held up like a champ. I think this box is a winner.