I have long used Synology enterprise NAS boxes, after bad experiences with Buffalo, Drobo, and the consumer-level Synology boxes. I have three running now, and the youngest one is 6 years old. It’s time to think about upgrading, to get hardware that isn’t approaching the end of its service life, and to get faster network connections. I looked at the current Synology rack mount line. They appear to be fine, if a bit pricy.
But I discovered a compelling reason not to get a new Synology enterprise NAS. Synology has come out with their own branded line of disks, and they have programmed the new enterprise boxes to refuse to operate properly with any other disk drives. The Synology-branded 16 TB drives go for more than seven hundred bucks, while NAS drives from Western Digital sell for less than half that.
I saw a QNAP NAS that ticked all my boxes:
- 12-bay
- 2U
- 10GbE and 2.5GbE connections
- Redundant power supplies
It was about half the price of an enterprise-level Synology box with roughly the same specs, and it would work with WD disks. So I bought one.
It arrived yesterday. I unboxed it, put 8 18TB WD drives in it, connected an Ethernet cable and power, and pressed the switch on the right handle. I went upstairs, fired up a program to locate QNAP NASs, and let it search. It found the NAS, and logged me in through a web browser. I updated the OS to the current version. I added user accounts and passwords. The system automatically disabled the admin account when I did that.
I took a look around. Their OS isn’t all that different from the one that Synology uses. Without reading any support material, I fairly easily created a storage pool with 6 drives in a RAID 6 configuration, and one hot spare. I had been using two hot spares on the Synology boxes, but I couldn’t figure out how to do that on the QNAP NAS. I created a volume in the pool.
Then I joined the NAS to the Windows domain Active Directory system. There’s a wizard for that. It looked like it worked, but Windows clients couldn’t access the volume. I fumbled around and found a set of permissions windows. Turns out the default is no access to volumes to AD users. I changed the permissions. Success.
I saw that the NAS was doing consistency checks in the background, and it was going very slowly.
I changed the priority of the checks:
Much better.
My Synology drives have been running at about 35 degrees Celsius:
The QNAP drives are running hotter:
I set the fan algorithm from its default “balanced” mode to “performance”. The disk temps didn’t drop much. I’ll wait until the synchronizing is over before I worry about that.
In general, I’m impressed.
[Added June 26, 2022]
One of the redundant power supplies failed. I was unable to find a replacement on the web. I opened a trouble ticket with QNAP support. This conversation ensued:
Rech: Please help verify it is the slot or the PSU itself by shutting the NAS down and moving the PSUs and seeing if the error follows. If you have an additional PSU, you can put it in to help confirm as well.
Me: Good idea. Before it said the second power supply had failed or been removed, and now it says the first power supply has failed or been removed. So it sounds like a PSU failure
Tech: You moved it is that correct? Can you provide me the Part# the failed PSU.
Me: Yes. I moved it and the problem followed the power supply. Delta part number: DPS-250AB-81 A. See attached for photo of label.
Tech: Please fill out this RMA link and then ship us the defective PSU and we will ship you a new one after we receive the defective PSU.
I filled out the RMA, and I’ll send in the failed power supply (at my expense).
Leave a Reply