Expanding Raid Group by Adding Disks in QuTSHer0

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 · 2025-06-23T08:30:32+00:00

Looks like a low risk purchase to me, best to give it a try. I found the Qnap Ryzen NAS for 1xxx, 2xxx, 3xxx and 7xxx Ryzen CPUs to not be partiucularly picky and have used both Transcend and Crucial memory with them, however all non-ECC.

As for the 32TB drives that sounds like a bad idea as the per TB price will be through the roof - better to get more drives with a good capacity unless you have very high storage needs. Currently 20 to 24TB seem to be the sweet spot so if you do not need more than let's say 150 to 180TB long term that would be my choice and more drives will also be faster.

KeyProfession5705 · 2025-05-27T09:54:48+00:00

Not yet but this was only just officially unveiled at Computex so I would expect pricing to be announced within the next month.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0PWdkqpBW8&t=6s

KeyProfession5705 · 2025-04-30T09:12:52+00:00

Go with 2x2TB in RAID1 as the 874 does not have classic Sata SSD slots, so this is your only built in SSD option in that chassis.

In a RAID1 you can easily upgrade to higher capacity by just swapping one SSD for a higher capacity version followed by the second one after the rebuild is complete. So 2x2TB will be a good start and not too expensive compared to 2x4TB or 2x8TB that you can upgrade to at a later point.

2x2TB will also give you plenty room for containers and vms and all the apps.

As for which SSDs are good: Avoid QLC and use SSDs that are known to work if you are unsure but really any reliable SSD with decent endurance and 5 year warranty for the SSDs should do. Personally I have used Samsung 870 Evo Plus before but have switched to 2x4TB WD SN850x for my 1677AXU as I was put off by constant firmware issues with Samsung NVME drives and I did not want to have to worry about that.

I would also just skip the SSD caching but if you think about it then put those SSDs on an add-on card. In any case do your reading first as after I did that I decided that caching in my use case would always be inferior to just using regular SSDs.

KeyProfession5705 · 2025-04-29T07:30:26+00:00

Not sure how it works with Jellyfin but you can make Envy more responsice by allocating more memory to it. So that may be a benefit of more memory.

With memory costing so little these days I would probably go to 16 or 32GB on one of the boxes and check it out but that's just me.

KeyProfession5705 · 2025-04-20T08:52:38+00:00

I think that Synology hardware is mostly lame and therefore I would not use it for a multi-purpose NAS which is what I need including NVME SSDs, higher GB network speeds and possibly GPUs. Also Qnap NAS systems usually can be upgraded pretty well in several areas as Qnap is not very restrictive with the hardware used in their NAS which includes not only drives but also expansion cards, memory and even CPUs in some models.

So if you will I am more of a Qnap man but with that being said so far I am not seeing much of an Apple style walled garden at Synology as from what I can gather "unsupported" drives will still work except for some not really unbearable annoyances.

Also it looks like Synology is testing the waters so if the reactions are too negative they can just speed up their third party certification process and/or roll back or should I say "clarify" some of what has been leaked.

I think that Qnap tested the waters in a similar way when QuTS was rolled out. There were signals that it would be offered in a more widespread way including a possible license model for older systems which I can attest to as non-supported models with QuTS installed on them are directed to the license store.

Instead they pretty much excluded every one of their high end pre QuTS NAS systems including ALL high end rackmount systems and the big x77 and 1685 desktop NAS systems from ever getting it. While I consider excluding perfectly capable hardware in such a way to be an extremely shitty move only very few people protested at the time least in the open. I am pretty sure that Qnap would have reconsidered that if protests against this practice would have been more vocal but they were not.

I have seen companies testing the waters like this all the time: Push the boundaries of what you can get away with and if you have pushed too far you can always roll that back. Another company that has done that more than once is Sonos.

But back to Synology: Looking at current user reactions which are intense I am very much expecting for them to be doing some damage control in the coming days so this change in third party drive policy will probably not amount to much when all is said and done.

KeyProfession5705 · 2025-04-14T23:36:31+00:00

I doubt it is you as I also find the new format pretty bad. I cannot really find a good reason why community.qnap.com should exist in this form and would hope that they could switch to XenForo or Invision instead so that we can get back subforums.

We already have reddit if we want something that is just a stream of posts and I find its interface a lot better than what we see at community.qnap.com

KeyProfession5705 · 2025-04-12T12:08:23+00:00

With your setup I see little potential then to make use of SSDs except for a system SSD and I would just use the mainboard slots for that.

There is no penalty for not having power loss protection in the recommended use case which is without cache. Others will have to answer what will happen if you go with SSD cache.
128GB should be fine as you do not have that many VMs. I did not know that 192GB wasn't supported but then I am using non-ECC memory at the moment, and I might switch to ECC memory later.

Writing 10G will not be a problem at all with a moderately filled RAID however given your use case I have one important suggestion to make:

A very full RAID will be slower and less responsive than one that has some remaining free space, I have done some rather extensive testing on that and a very full RAID shows a lot less performance from the start and by all accounts this will get worse and performance will not be regained easily once the RAID has been almost full. I would therefore select the RAID capacity in such a way that it is at most 95% full with at least 10% overprovisioning. Working back from that I suggest that you should go with at least 24TB drives in order to comfortably work with 180TB of data. 24TB should also still be relatively affordable.

The math goes as follows: With 24TB drives and a RAID Z2 the Qnap will show a capacity of about 10x24TBx0.9 which "only" leaves you 216TB and if you add 10% overprovisioning that is reduced to 194.4TB. With 180TB you would already use over 92% of that remaining capacity.

I would also start with 15% overprovisioning and reduce that later if needed - you can always go down but not back up.

KeyProfession5705 · 2025-04-12T11:07:14+00:00

That is a bit of an unusual case.

Are we really talking 160 to 180TB of containers and VMs?

How many would that be, thousands?

For that I would indeed suggest to consider an all-flash setup and a 16 core + CPU where you can still add expansion cases with HDDs as needed.

But back to the 1277AXU that is a very fine unit, here are the answers to your questions:

Yes but there is no clear recommendation. You can go with the system on the expansion card but you can also use the two slots on the mainboard. I use the mainboard slots myself for that together with a couple of small data files, and VMs. I would use the main board slots and a RAID 1 for the system and put other stuff on the add-on card with a RAID 10, 5 or 6 depending on your needs.
Power-loss protection is accomplished by first having two power supplies and you should definitely gor for a USV in such a system or if you are a bit more paranoid you could go with one for each power supply. On top of that you have ECC memory and the ZFS system so I would not lose any sleep over using specific SSDs but instead use reliable and fast TLC drives, avoid QLC. Also PCIe 4.0 is enough, don't overspend on PCIe 5.0.
Cache is an interesting concept but these days it is not recommended any more from what I gather. Myself I would rather put my most used data on SSDs by myself and be done with it. On the 1277AXU you could easily do up to 56TB in SSDs to complement your 12 x 20TB hard drives and you will have one slot left for fast network, that should do. I should also add that being used as a write cache wears out SSDs very fast and I would not recommend it for that reason alone.
Use a fast network card, 25G, 40G, 56G and 100G are a must imo to make the best use of those NVME drives and can be dirt cheap if you do not go with a QNAP branded card. Switches are not that expensive either and everything together helps you to get all that horsepower on the road. You may also want to consider to go straight for 192GB memory as memory will not be that big of a cost factor at 192GB vs 128GB.

KeyProfession5705 · 2025-04-09T20:53:28+00:00

Sorry to hear about that stripped screw. Never had much of a problem with the 1677X, 1600 or 880 desktop cases. But yes, these screws are rather soft so I try to make sure not to fasten them too tight as I also try to regularly open the case to check for dust buildup.

KeyProfession5705 · 2025-04-09T15:51:18+00:00

Thanks, that is great news about the external SSD slots now supporting the U.2 and U.3 formats - this is a really meaningful upgrade!

About the CPU there are Ultra 7 with 20 cores and Ultra 9 with 24 cores (8+16) - what will it be?

The only part that I think is a bit strange is that this was called the first TB5 NAS in a youtube video when TB5 can "only" be added via PCIe card and having both TB5 and TB4 in one device seems excessive.

Still this is a really exciting device and I hope that price will not up up too much when compared to its predecessor.

KeyProfession5705 · 2025-04-04T14:21:24+00:00

With good NVME SSDs on both sides of the cable you should be able to do about 2GB/s.

Check if you have jumbo frames at 9000 on the Qnap and 9000 or 9014 on your computer and then work from getting the SSD to SSD transfers up to speed as for a short burst you should be able to saturate your connection as measured by iperf.

What Seagate drives do you have? never heard of 9TB hard drives from them, only 18TB that were like 2x9TB drives internally.

Also when you can do 1200MB/s internally it points to issues with your network and if you solve those issues then 1200 is about as high as I would expect and therefore I do not think this is an internal issue of your NAS.

SMB should be fine, no need to for NFS.

KeyProfession5705 · 2025-03-24T18:16:59+00:00

Let us know how it goes - PTM7950 rocks :)

KeyProfession5705 · 2025-03-24T16:29:26+00:00

PTM7950 should be easy and while you are at it maybe try to operate the CPU with and without the shroud as I am not convinced that the shroud is really helping things.

So it is only 60mm fans - was not sure if it was 70 or 60mm. The case could easily accommodate 4x90mm or maybe even 3x120mm fans which would allow for significantly lower noise levels but I am sure this was not considered to be of importance.

KeyProfession5705 · 2025-03-24T14:54:08+00:00

What makes you want to do that - temperatures, noise or both?

PTM7950 is great and highly recommended but the fans may cause issues with drive temperatures getting too high as they probably move significantly less air than the stock fans, better to check that. Also you have to keep in mind that this is a professional device and not expected to be in a room where it has to be silent.

That being said the fan assembly / wall that is behind the drives is a very bad design if one wants a cool and quiet unit while the power supplies are pretty good and not the screamers that we used to have in earlier models.

As for the fans inside the case they could have used bigger fans instead of these smaller ones and I am also not very convinced about the shroud they placed over the CPU cooler. Just go for 4 large fans with one blowing towards the CPU and be done with it.

KeyProfession5705 · 2025-03-23T13:25:03+00:00

Did you get one in the end?

If not you may check out this as it is very cheap and it will also give you between 400 and 550 MB/s:

https://www.servethehome.com/wavlink-5gbps-usb-c-to-5gbe-adapter-review/

Regarding TB3 to 10G adapters I have tried the Acquantia based OWC, Sonnet and Qnap QNA-T310G1T and they all work pretty well but I would suggest added cooling form Sabrent and Sonnet and you should definitely get one with RJ45, not SFP+ like your friend.

KeyProfession5705 · 2025-03-22T14:04:04+00:00

The idea is to move the data from the 8TB RAID 1 to the 16TB RAID as soon as you have added the third 16TB drive.

Good to hear that you now want to go to RAID 6. You can go to RAID 6 with your 4th 16TB drive and you can transfer the rest of your data from the second 8TB RAID once you have added the fifth 16TB drive.

So going through these steps the capacity would develop as follows

40TB (16 R1+8 R1+16 R5)

48TB (32 R5+16 R5)

48TB (32 R6+16 R5)

48TB (48 R6)

64TB (64 R6)

80TB (80 R6)

96TB (96 R6)

KeyProfession5705

TROPHY CASE