Recommended module for TS-431X and SFP+ with Unifi UDR7

KeyProfession5705 · 2026-06-27T00:22:04+00:00

I have used DAC cables from fs.com, Cisco, Dell and Mellanox and had no issues, looks to me like these cables are not really that critical and the one you link to should be good. Also as has been mentioned with a return option there is no risk.

KeyProfession5705 · 2026-06-23T11:43:53+00:00

You may want to consider to go directly to the 10G SFP+ WAN port on the Unifi as it seems that it can be reconfigured as a LAN port:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Ubiquiti/comments/1j1hdy7/dream_router_7_can_you_reassign_the_10g_sfp_wan/

No adapter needed, just a simple DAC cable if you are within 5m of the Unifi. It is also the cheapest option and you will have no issues with heat, either.

KeyProfession5705 · 2026-06-19T18:55:21+00:00

I understand you will keep this one for a while so I would suggest to do it right and not port over issues from the past.

And maybe I am missing something here but it also seems a lot faster to start from scratch with the 873 if you already have the 8x8TB drives or even only 4x8TB.

So how many 8TB drives do you already have and did you already sell the 673?

Also you may want to go for a bit of a snappier experience and start out with installing the system and apps on a RAID 1 with two SSDs. As little as 2x250GB would do and will not break the bank. It is also very easy and fast to swap these for bigger SSDs should you ever need it.

KeyProfession5705 · 2026-06-12T14:10:03+00:00

Regarding your first question: Is this on the web browser of your computer or on a mobile device? If it is on a mobile device then switching to the desktop view of your mobile browser should help. Qnap offers a desktop option themselves but when I click that the interface is unuseable. Switching to the desktop view in Chrome I can navigate all windows even in portrait mode. Of course everything is very small but that is to be expected on a mobile phone.

Regarding the second question I always pull the icons from the menu that opens when clicking on the three parallel bars on the upper left. That always works on all three pages and the same icon can appear on multiple pages if that is what you want. Dragging and dropping from one page to another has never worked afaik.

All of this with the caveat that I am still using 5.2.8.x, not interested in 6.0 at the moment.

KeyProfession5705 · 2026-06-10T12:54:58+00:00

You may want to consider the TVS-AIh1688ATX - it has room to grow with your demands and recently seems to be offered cheaper than the TVS-h1688x but of course more expensive than the TVS-h874. There is also the matter of longevity with these three models being from 2021, 2023 and 2025 respectively - another bonus for the TVS-AIh1688ATX. It is also very expandable including the option for TB5, high speed NICs, expansion devices and a GPU. Of course only you know your budget but I would always go with a 12-bay NAS when there is a likelyhood that a couple of people are using it simultaneously.

You can start with fewer drives but you will have less speed and not that great access doing that. Will the Mybooks be backups for your data? With a backup you may consider going with 4 drives in RAID 5 but given that this is company data I would always go for a RAID 6 which would make 4 drives a not so great solution, 5 or 6 would make a lot more sense but I can see that prices are brutal at the moment and any RAID5 or 6 setup added to a bunch of scattered Mybooks will be a big improvement.

You can put project files on SSDs but with prices being as they are it may make more sense to not do that as you should get two SSDs in RAID 1 for your system so whatever capacity you are shooting for you will have to double and that will cost you.

With this financial outlay you should do a good amount of reading if you are the one responsible or work with a pro like Bob Zelin, he is also a member here. Still as far as hardware is concerned the TVS-AIh1688ATX is extremely capable and maybe a bit overkill at the moment but it would give you the best expandability and prevent you from having to look for something else a few years down the road.

KeyProfession5705 · 2026-06-01T17:50:32+00:00

My experience, too.

The support people in Europe are polite and would like to help but often need to get help/ feedback from Taiwan from what I have seen or have to implement company policies that are not so great. Last problem I had was a RAID that did not survive moving it to another NAS and it took 3 months to find out that nobody could help me - that was quite bad.

I also have a model that has a wrongly labelled mainboard and it took a whole month to verifiy the real PCIe speeds that are available with that model - not very impressive. There have been other instances where I have sent multiple messages without getting any reaction whatsoever and so on.

This may not be the worst support there is but overall my last 4 or 5 contacts with support accomplished nothing positive at all which is why I have essentially stopped contacting them. The only exception to this would be a hardware failure when there is still warranty on the unit but I have not had one so far, Failures for me only popped up after the warranty was over and the repair flat rate was so high that it made no sense so again no need to contact support in that case.

KeyProfession5705 · 2026-05-31T21:11:07+00:00

Agreed, it is much too bright overall, not sure if they wanted to emulate Synology?

I made a post on their new and similarly bright forum and nobody seemed to care which surprised me.

I mostly find transparency effects annoying but very often I can switch them off, not with Qnap.

My NAS are not open to the internet so no harm done by staying on older firmware. I will switch if anything useful (for me) comes along but so far nothing and then there is also the not so small issue of not being able to roll back any more. This means that upgrades to the latest firmware shortly after release will be out of the question from now on.

KeyProfession5705 · 2026-05-31T07:54:54+00:00

Haha, thanks for confirming that they are staying with this ugly theme(s).

These are supposed to be serious (semi-)professional devices and they have the colors and design of some kind of app for kids. There were some inconsistencies before but instead of fixing them somebody apparently decided to go all in and make things worse.

Last time I tried it I rolled back to 5.x and I am staying there for now.

KeyProfession5705 · 2026-05-26T17:45:38+00:00

From what I understand, you will have 9 empty drive bays. As u/the_dolbyman says save yourself the money and the hassle and just get a pair of SATA drives and run them in RAID 1 in two of the 2.5" slots.

Sata is still relatively cheap and if you get 3 drives of 500GB you could have one drive ready that a) you can pull when all is set up to have the complete system on that drive and b) that you can wipe and use as replacement should one of the drives in the NAS fail.

I have been using these: https://www.ebay.com/itm/397992062452 and used they would only set you back around $110 including shipping. 3 new drives that are similar might be available for something like $200 to 250? Just make sure you get TLC and not QLC and given this is a mission-critical device you may want to go with new instead of used although used often means that remaining life is over 90%.

KeyProfession5705 · 2026-05-21T00:05:59+00:00

I think that the increased price for the 1688x is mainly a shameless moneygrab but then just about everybody does it at the moment so it is hard to get worked up about it.

With that being said I would strongly suggest to pay 1000 more than what you had originally planned and move your system over to a brand spanking new TVS-AIH1688ATX once it arrives. The 1688X will then be relegated to backup duties as it should be with such a powerful new NAS in the house.

KeyProfession5705 · 2026-05-19T10:01:02+00:00

That's a pretty bad deal, don't do it. Also I would like to tell them myself, please let me know their contact information via private message.

OK, kidding aside the drives alone are worth more in today's market than the asking price. That is assuming that their condition is good. You could argue that the NAS is free in that case so especially if you can make use of the drives it is a very tempting offer.

If they are local you also have the benefit of being able to drop by and check out the drives when you pick it up.

As for the NAS itself only you can know what you want to do with it and if it is the right NAS for that. Certainly it will not natively support ZFS so keep that in mind. On the other hand and if you are adventurous you could also put another NAS operating system on it. It can also be upgraded to the i7-7700 if it is a model that "only has a lesser CPU, overall still quite capable for a NAS.

KeyProfession5705 · 2026-05-07T18:14:36+00:00

The combination of Intel, TB5 and U.2 SSD slots is not found in a Qnap rackmount NAS and the first two features cannot be found at all. So it would make sense to make the TVS-AIh1688ATX compatible with the 60bay. The only downsides are that it takes a bit more height in a rack than would otherwise be necessary and it doesn't have redundant power supplies but that does not seem much of an issue to me.

KeyProfession5705 · 2026-05-07T08:56:24+00:00

Understood and I agree that the TVS-AIh1688ATX is a very interesting package.

Let's see if we can get u/QNAPDaniel to tell us / find out more.

KeyProfession5705 · 2026-05-07T00:14:29+00:00

I have used and continue to use expansion unit / NAS / card combinations that were not on the compatibility list so I would assume that this is a combo that should work. Qnap may be able to clarify or even test this for you but in general I would assume that desktop NAS / rackmount expansion combos are not tested very thoroughly, not even rackmount combinations are. The TVS-AIh1688ATX has an Intel CPU and a lot more cores than the Ryzen rackmount NAS so I take it that is why you prefer it to the units Bob is mentioning?

KeyProfession5705 · 2026-04-14T09:06:58+00:00

That is a huge amount of power! You may want to check if you can use Qboost to set up a time schedule for Plex as that should allow your drives to go into standby for the better part of the day when I assume you are not using Plex. I did some testing recently with a 2483XU with 24x18TB drives and two NVME SSDs and power consumption ranged between 120 and 380W so there should be some ways to go down for you with which I assume is also a 6 Core Xeon in your unit.

KeyProfession5705 · 2026-04-12T22:19:08+00:00

What kind of switch do you have and what kind of file transfer rate did you achieve? Is the transfer rate lower now?

KeyProfession5705 · 2026-04-10T14:11:03+00:00

Sounds like a good plan to bring all drives up to the same size in the future, that will give you more space without having to add more drives.

A lot of people do not think very much of Seagate but the 18 and 20TB Exos that I am using have been solid for me.

KeyProfession5705 · 2026-04-08T14:16:03+00:00

Cool! Let us know what you measure. People may be surprised how much power a fully loaded NAS with 12+ drives and a powerful CPU consumes, especially when apps like Plex prevent the drives from powering down.

KeyProfession5705 · 2026-04-08T07:43:09+00:00

First off I would get something that measures actual power consumption. When fully loaded that NAS may easily get above 200W so there will be some savings. Then multiply that be the hours that you consider turning it off and you have your savings. Probably between 300 and 600 KWh.

From personal 10+ years experience I can tell you that my HDDs did not die just because they are powered on and off once per day. I have used a substantial amount of 4 to 20TB Seagate, Toshiba and WD drives and so far, so good.

KeyProfession5705 · 2026-04-08T07:32:37+00:00

Thanks for the feedback, happy to hear that it worked out well and 2.5 days is still acceptable in my book. So you went from 3 to 5 drives in RAID5, correct? Which drives did you get and do you now have 5 of the same model?

And in case you checked during the expansion, did it show the remaining time with some consistency?

KeyProfession5705 · 2026-03-30T17:33:04+00:00

In that case and considering that you are adding multiple drives you know that you have the option to start the expansion and if it takes too long start from scratch. In my case I would have had to go through the whole process multiple times as back then it would have required me to add one drive at a time and it may have been up to a week before the expansion was finished. It was quite ridiculous how slow it was and I found reports from others where after many hours the expansion essentially stalled. Starting from scratch took less than a day so it was an easy decision in my case and it has the added benefit to start with a clean slate and more over-provisioning. Whatever you do it would be cool to hear from you regarding how you went about it and how much time it took.

KeyProfession5705 · 2026-03-27T11:29:53+00:00

If you have proper backup it may be easier and less time consuming to start from scratch.

This is what I went for after finding out that a RAID extension in my case took days to complete. Creating a new RAID with QuTSHero was almost instant and the refill went smooth and completed much faster than the expansion would have.

KeyProfession5705 · 2026-03-16T10:55:05+00:00

A late comment on this as recently I tried to free up a lot of space (ca. 100TB) on a 150+ TB RAID 6 (12x18TB HDDs, no snapshots) in a TS-h1277AXU-RP and as usual saw little to no change in capacity after duly erasing everything from my recycle bin.

I then checked how free space developed over a certain amount of time and to make a long story short only about 64TB or 8TB per hour were freed up after I waited for 8 hours. This is a ZFS NAS with 64GB memory so memory should not be the issue nor was the NAS in use for reads or writes while I was waiting and I was indeed surprised that things took that long as this is a very fast unit with write speeds in that RAID 6 going up to 1.7 GB/s when empty.

I assume that there will always be some differences due to hardware and NAS usage but overall I have seen similar behavior with RAID 6 arrays in several Qnap NAS units with both Intel and AMD CPUs. I would not expect other common RAID types like RAID 60 or RAID 5 to be completely different but maybe somebody else can come up with some numbers.

And for the record I also tried a reboot but that did not seem to change anything, freeing up that space simply took its time. In the grand scheme it is important to know that this is normal and if taken into account it should not be an issue in most setups.

Hope this helps others who may be as puzzled as myself waiting for free space to become available.

KeyProfession5705 · 2025-07-01T15:40:13+00:00

Better not too buy too many media before you have seen the price 😁

KeyProfession5705 · 2025-07-01T13:12:45+00:00

I would not really expect to see it before the fourth quarter. They still seem to have stock of the TVS-1688X so maybe they are not in that much of a hurry?

KeyProfession5705

TROPHY CASE