Question for all you out there. I just received my new Qnap TR-004 and am waiting for my drives to show up. I have 4 16TB Toshiba Enterprise drives on their way in the mail. The main unit is a Qnap TS-453d running 4 8TB Toshiba drives. My question is since the expansion will be hooked up to a Qnap unit would you run the raid in software to take advantage of the Qnap features or run it in hardware to get the increase in reliability? I’ve been struggling with the decision and the drives will be here very soon, so I need to make a choice lol.
Update to this question. I have also recently been looking at adding M.2 SSD’s to my NAS and was wondering if anyone has done that how they prefer to have them set up in a Plex oriented machine. Cache vs. Tier vs. Storage Pool. I was personally thinking that they would be best used as a storage pool that contains Plex and all of it’s database info.
When my QNAP was primary PMS,
- Created SSD static volume
- App Center → Select Plex → Migrate to (the SSD volume)
That’s as fast as it can be done.
So the preference was to have them as a storage pool instead of a cache? Also I would love in you have any insight on the RAID question I had earlier.
Because I have a second NAS, I can make a mirror backup of the entire RAID volume (the media).
My configuration:
- CACHEDEV1 = QTS (SSD)
- CACHEDEV2 = Main - STATIC volume for media
- CACHEDEV3 = PMS (SSD) - STATIC volume
I had a few more volumes but you get the idea.
I use RAID 5 for my media. There was no reason to waste the space because the whole array is backed up.
I do not use “Storage Pool” because they are faster. – Static volumes only (they too can be expanded)
Alright. That makes sense. For your media volumes I assume you have them in software RAID. With this new expansion I ordered it has the option to do either hardware or software RAID and I can’t seem to find any good information on what the preference is when using it with QTS. Everyone seems to to agree that the greater reliability of hardware is preferred, but all the scenarios I have seen are fairly generalized. I’m curious if because all of the physical hardware is Qnap if running the new RAID on the expansion in software would be better.
Yes, I have sotware RAID. The i7-7700 can easily handle the load of MDADM for a volume of this size. The primary limiting factor is the bus speed limitation (shared PCIE ports)
I think the J4125 in my NAS has pretty limited PCIe capability, in which case hardware my be the way to go. Would you agree? I also am beginning to reach what I think is pretty huge capacities. 96TB split between 4 8TB hard drives in software RAID 5 on the main unit, and 4 16TB drives that will be in the expansion in either software or hardware based RAID 5.
On most QNAP models, you will find:
- PCIE is somewhat oversubscribed
- PCIE is commonly Gen 3
My TVS-1282 i7 had PCIE Gen 3 with an i7-7700 (28 lanes total)
Not sure what hardware will buy you other than another single-point-of-failure
So I ended up going with a software RAID 5 on the expansion as QTS won’t allow you to use it as additional NAS storage if it isn’t set up in software. I have a bit of an issue now or its possible I’m just dumb. After getting everything set up and hooking up the expansion through a 5Gbps USB 3.1 port I can only get transfers to and from the expansion of about 100MB/s with big swings up and down in speed. I find that strange as I am using 7200RPM Toshiba enterprise grade drives and the network is a 2.5Gbps network. If I send files to the main unit they transfer at 250-300MB/s like expected. But anything going to or from the expansion whether it be through Windows, QTS, or internally between the main unit and the expansion seems to run quite slow.
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