- Aug 25, 2001
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Ok, so it looks like perhaps (?), it's time to swap in some fresh drives into one of my NAS units.
Let me give you some history.
I've got two QNAP units, a TS-451 and a TS-431, and an Asustor 6104T. All are 4-bay NAS units, the TS-451 and Asustor have Intel CPUs, the TS-431 has ARM.
I've got 4x5TB Seagate desktop DM5 drives in the TS-451, then I filled the TS-431 with 4x8TB WD Red, and then I filled the Asustor with 4x10TB WD Red (White label).
All were shucked from externals!
Anyways, back in the day, there were vendors shucking the 5TB DM Seagate desktop drives from externals, and selling them, and they got a really bad reputation for use in a NAS, I found out.
Mine, I shucked personally, and I still haven't had any real quality issues from them, but recently, I bought some 5GbE-T USB3.x adapters from QNAP, and some 2.5GbE-T adapters from Asustor, for their respective NAS units, and then one of the 2.5GbE-T Asustor adapters on my main PC. (I had a 10GbE-T NIC from Asus, PCI-E 3.0 x4, but it seems like it well and truely died in a week. No response, nothing in device manager, even in another test PC, and the Dell firmware update (only one I could find) from Aquantia wouldn't find the card to update.
So I've also got two 8-port 2.5GbE-T switches, each with 2x 10GbE SPF+ ports, and a pair of copper 10GbE-T transceivers for the SFP+ ports.
I was able to successfully get 270MB/sec read, and 170MB/sec write, to my Asustor NAS with that arrangement. But I haven't even been able to get 100MB/sec read and write with the TS-451, even after re-configuring it to a 4x5TB RAID-0 static volume without encryption. I max out at 50-60MB/sec writes to the NAS, and sometimes, it stalls out and goes down to zero for a while. (Edit: I was able to get 270+MB/sec reads off of the TS-451 with the 4x5TB Seagate DM drives too, turned out that the RealTek (Asustor) 2.5GbE-T USB3.x adapter, was resetting, and auto-detecting as 1.0Gbit/sec ethernet, even though I was using a nice CAT6 cable straight to the switch.)
So I think that the drives (SMR, apparently, I didn't know at the time that I bought them) are on the way out.
I was toying with the idea of wiping both sets of drives on the TS-451 and TS-431, and swapping them, so that the 4x8TB WD Red (5400RPM) would be in the TS-451, and I could test again with RAID-5, to see if the problem is the drives' age, or what.
I also own several WD MyBook Desktop External (REFURB) 4TB units that could be shucked (4x), and 2x Retail-box Toshiba X300 6TB, which I guess I could pull out and put into the TS-451 as a mirror pair, just for testing, too.
Edit: I'm not against getting some 8TB+ Enterprise drives, like WD RE4 Gold, or Hitachi (insert-long-cryptic-model-string-here), or Seagate Constellation ES or something. Also Helium drives are OK. Some thing that would last for at least 3-5 years longer, in a less demanding setting than an enterprise VM server, or whatnot. (I don't do much VM work yet, although I wouldn't mind trying that out with my Intel-based NAS units, in the future. I messed with it briefly, and never got to the stage of installing the VM-accelerator drivers into the Guest OS, because it was just going SO SLOW on the NAS processor.)
TL;DR: Maybe need four more 8-10+TB HDDs, looking at refurb enterprise, or WD Red, or Toshiba NAS, or Hitachi (consumer/NAS?).
Let me give you some history.
I've got two QNAP units, a TS-451 and a TS-431, and an Asustor 6104T. All are 4-bay NAS units, the TS-451 and Asustor have Intel CPUs, the TS-431 has ARM.
I've got 4x5TB Seagate desktop DM5 drives in the TS-451, then I filled the TS-431 with 4x8TB WD Red, and then I filled the Asustor with 4x10TB WD Red (White label).
All were shucked from externals!
Anyways, back in the day, there were vendors shucking the 5TB DM Seagate desktop drives from externals, and selling them, and they got a really bad reputation for use in a NAS, I found out.
Mine, I shucked personally, and I still haven't had any real quality issues from them, but recently, I bought some 5GbE-T USB3.x adapters from QNAP, and some 2.5GbE-T adapters from Asustor, for their respective NAS units, and then one of the 2.5GbE-T Asustor adapters on my main PC. (I had a 10GbE-T NIC from Asus, PCI-E 3.0 x4, but it seems like it well and truely died in a week. No response, nothing in device manager, even in another test PC, and the Dell firmware update (only one I could find) from Aquantia wouldn't find the card to update.
So I've also got two 8-port 2.5GbE-T switches, each with 2x 10GbE SPF+ ports, and a pair of copper 10GbE-T transceivers for the SFP+ ports.
I was able to successfully get 270MB/sec read, and 170MB/sec write, to my Asustor NAS with that arrangement. But I haven't even been able to get 100MB/sec read and write with the TS-451, even after re-configuring it to a 4x5TB RAID-0 static volume without encryption. I max out at 50-60MB/sec writes to the NAS, and sometimes, it stalls out and goes down to zero for a while. (Edit: I was able to get 270+MB/sec reads off of the TS-451 with the 4x5TB Seagate DM drives too, turned out that the RealTek (Asustor) 2.5GbE-T USB3.x adapter, was resetting, and auto-detecting as 1.0Gbit/sec ethernet, even though I was using a nice CAT6 cable straight to the switch.)
So I think that the drives (SMR, apparently, I didn't know at the time that I bought them) are on the way out.
I was toying with the idea of wiping both sets of drives on the TS-451 and TS-431, and swapping them, so that the 4x8TB WD Red (5400RPM) would be in the TS-451, and I could test again with RAID-5, to see if the problem is the drives' age, or what.
I also own several WD MyBook Desktop External (REFURB) 4TB units that could be shucked (4x), and 2x Retail-box Toshiba X300 6TB, which I guess I could pull out and put into the TS-451 as a mirror pair, just for testing, too.
Edit: I'm not against getting some 8TB+ Enterprise drives, like WD RE4 Gold, or Hitachi (insert-long-cryptic-model-string-here), or Seagate Constellation ES or something. Also Helium drives are OK. Some thing that would last for at least 3-5 years longer, in a less demanding setting than an enterprise VM server, or whatnot. (I don't do much VM work yet, although I wouldn't mind trying that out with my Intel-based NAS units, in the future. I messed with it briefly, and never got to the stage of installing the VM-accelerator drivers into the Guest OS, because it was just going SO SLOW on the NAS processor.)
TL;DR: Maybe need four more 8-10+TB HDDs, looking at refurb enterprise, or WD Red, or Toshiba NAS, or Hitachi (consumer/NAS?).
Last edited:
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