QNAP TR-004 4 Bay Desktop NAS Expansion - Optional Use as a Direct-Attached Storage Device

Product Information

Was on the phone with QNAP support for 45 minutes. Tried various things. Time ran out for the day, so got off the phone and continued to troubleshoot. Here's one we both couldn't figure out: in Storage and Snapshots > External Storage, the "Type" for the tr-004 was showing up as USB 2.0, even though it was connected via USB-C on the tr-004 to USB-C on the TVS-872ZXT. When connected to a Windows 10 and configured in RAID 5 (formatted as HFS): read/write at 190MB/s - 200MB/s The TR-004U does not support the following: the TS-128, TS-228, TS-131, TS-231, TS-431, TS-431U, and NAS models that cannot be updated to QTS 4.3.6 (or later). OR alternatively you can set it up as a raid5 on standalone mode using the windows qnap utility app that can create the raid5 without using qts. I believe that you can still connect this to the QNAP and use as an external USB. But whenever you want to manage it, you need to connect to a windows pc and use the qnap utility app for tr-004 i presume. Warning: Using unsupported modules may degrade performance, cause errors, or prevent the operating system from starting.

QTS คือระบบปฏิบัติการสำหรับ QNAP NAS ระดับเริ่มต้นและระดับกลาง ระบบ Linux และ ext4 ทำให้ QTS เป็นที่เก็บข้อมูลที่เชื่อถือได้สำหรับทุกคน ด้วยฟีเจอร์และแอปต่างๆ ที่เพิ่มมูลค่าและมีประโยชน์หลากหลาย อย่างเช่น สแนปช็อต, Plex Media Server และระบบคลาวด์ส่วนตัวของคุณที่เข้าถึงได้ง่าย ระบบ

Product Reviews

QNAP reserves the right to replace partial parts or accessories if the original is no longer available from its manufacturer/supplier. Any replacement would be fully tested and verified to meet strict compatibility and stability guidelines and will deliver identical performance to the original. For myself i just power off my external tl-d400s. My nas is setup for 24/7 that never spins down, because my usage patterns would probly trigger spinups/downs too frequently, so my case it's probly not worth it. also i'm not aware if whether my own device can keep the tl-d400s in a spindown state when it's not even doing anything, so i just use the power off just to be sure. Perhaps the Enable Write Cache setting only controls write cache for internal drives and not external?

From people's experience here and what I've seen, I'd almost have to conclude that TR-004 shall have never been advertised as it can be used as a NAS storage (for its poor performance with RAID 5), as was described in the product manual and the advertisement video https://live.qnap.com/en/video/show/2430 or on youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5_ahKpjF6A. But I do hope there is a solution that can make TR-004 as a NAS storage pool with RAIDs truly functional. There are three drives in the TS-332X in RAID-5 but writes to those work great - ~300MB/s from PC to NAS. It seems only the TR-004 is affected. Note that I get read speeds ~150MB/s still under this configuration. A couple interesting tidbits. First, when I connect the unit directly to a Windows PC, I am able to write at ~100MB/s! What's very interesting is that at first, I would get slow write speeds ~40MB/s on the Windows PC. I enabled write caching in Windows for the device (I guess it defaulted off because it's external storage) and then I got the 100MB/s speeds I quoted above. It's like write cache is disabled on the NAS - however, I verified that in Control Panel -> System -> Hardware -> General tab, Enable Write Cache (EXT4 delay allocation) is enabled. I've also tried with and without Control Panel -> Network & File Services -> Win/Mac/NFS -> Microsoft Networking -> Advanced Options -> Enable Asynchronous I/O enabled. I also tried disabling the "Enable Write Cache." It seems like the combination that gives the best performance for the internal RAID is for Enable Write Cache to be enabled and Enable Asynchronous I/O to be disabled (which I believe is default config out of the box). QuTS hero is the operating system for high-end and enterprise QNAP NAS models. With Linux and ZFS, QuTS hero supports advanced data reduction technologies for further driving down costs and increasing reliablility of SSD (all-flash) storage. System At 512KB I/O Size and larger, RAID 0 and RAID 10 achieved right around 225-230 MB/sec write and 245 MB/sec read, with 4KB at about 22 MB/sec write and 25 MB/sec read. JBOD, which effectively is single drive speed at 64KB and above hovered around 175 MB/sec write and read speed, with 4K at about 25 MB/sec for both read and write.

Overview:

spindown is good for saving on electricity bill, and MAY prolong life. I say MAY, because if you are spinning up the drives too often, it MAY instead be negatively affecting longevity i suspect. If you won't be triggering much spin up/downs on a highly frequent basis, it may be worth doing. Compared with other RAID enclosures, the TR-004 provides software-controlled configurations for greater management flexibility. Users can configure RAID and monitor disk health using Storage & Snapshots Manager on a QNAP NAS, or by using the QNAP External RAID Manager utility on their computer.

Without going too much into the software, it has some good basic functionality. It allows offers RAID setup, individual drive information including S.M.A.R.T. values direct from the drives, which you can't do with other utilities in Windows or on MacOS when connected to the TR-004. Simple status for each drive is also displayed like "GOOD" and associated drive bay also highlighted green if there's no issues. Firmware can also be updated through this app as well. So far mine came with the latest 1.004. I haven't seen a solution in this thread, and I have the same issue since I have had the TR-004 in September. My configuration and use case are as follows: The TR-004U can only be used as an individual storage pool or volume on the NAS. Its storage pool/volume cannot be combined into the connected NAS. NAS applications cannot be installed on the TR-004U. anyway if you are interested on the topic, you can google "spindown vs 24/7 hard drive", there should be an answer on reddit or on quora on the subject. There are 2 camps, those for spindown, and those for keeping the disks on nas running 24/7.

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Drives can only be migrated from one TR-004 to another TR-004. The files and data stored on drives moved to/from a NAS (or another device) will not be recognized.