QNAP QuTS 5.0.1 ZFS NAS Software Review - Best of Both Worlds?
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- čas přidán 6. 07. 2024
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Video Chapters
00:00 - The Start
01:20 - WHY is this video SO LONG?
04:00 - Disclaimers about my QuTS hero h5.0.1 Review
05:40 - The GUI and Browser GUI of QuTS 5.1
07:00 - Control Panel and User Account Controls
11:10 - Remote Access
13:00 - Security Management and Security Councilor
16:35 - Storage Management, Access and Options
21:18 - Hybrid Cloud, Cloud Storage Connectivity and Bolt On Storage
26:30 - Too Many Licenses
26:55 - File/Folder Access Natively
30:28 - Apps and Service Installation and Control
24:12 - Network Management
36:19 - VPNs
37:29 - Backups and Sync Tools
41:28 - Client-side Synchronization (Native OS access)
42:00 - File Streaming, Pinning and Ad Hoc Sync
43:00 - Support of SaaS and PaaS 3rd Part Platforms
46:23 - Multimedia Tools
48:41 - QuMagie is still GREAT
52:44 - Multimedia Console is still an overlooked gem
58:52 - QNAP QVR Surveillance Client Tool
55:05 - Surveillance with QVR Elite
01:01:20 - AI Surveillance Services
01:03:10 - MORE Licenses
01:01:56 - Virtual Machines, VM Backups and Container Deployment
01:10:15 - Review Conclusion. What Do I think of QNAP QuTS 5..0.1
QNAP NAS QTS 5.0 System Software & Services - How Well Does It Review?
When buying a NAS system, it is easy to forget that you are getting more than a bunch of hard drives connected to the internet/network. In fact, most modern NAS systems arrive with software and services included in the price that can often be compared with a full operating system like Android, Windows or macOS. With the focus on storage, these NAS based software and services that were once glorified breadcrumb based file managers have become incredibly detailed and diverse from one another. Very few of the current NAS platforms right now are quite as flexible as the QNAP NAS QTS software that is included with all of their hardware systems and QTS 5.0 (the most recent update to the software) is going to need to do a hell of a job to balance customization with ease of use. Today I want to review both the whole of QTS as software and also detail what QTS 5.0 has brought in, what works, what doesn't;t and ultimately decide if QNAP NAS is right for you and your data.
Important - This review is about QTS as a whole, not just the QTS 5.0 update. So, a good % of it will be of services that already existed in the previous version of QTS (new additions and changes will be highlighted appropriately). So, if you are already very familiar with QTS, then there will be a lot of elements that are familiar to you already.
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I purchased a TVS-h1688x in late 2021 to replace a couple of elderly servers in my homelab. I was new to QNAP but not new to IT best practices and one of the things that attracted me to this machine was the ZFS based disk OS. If you work in enterprise systems like I do, you understand the appeal for data reliability. And while the unit shipped with QuTS 4.5.4, I decided to put my unit in production when QuTS 5.0 shipped. That wasn't exactly a conservative decision, but I have good backups and decided to get to know the system with the new release, which was a year ago. Since then, I have some observations.
The bones of QuTS 5.0 are very good but there was a significant shakedown cruise concerning bugs that I wouldn't have wanted a business relying on. Even QNAP support warned me that I probably should wait a few months until deploying it, but since I was a home user, I did it anyway. One of the frustrating things then and now is that sometimes the unit cannot properly shutdown or reboot if asked. What happens is that the unit will get hung up trying to close something and there is no way to tell what the offending program is. But this is where having ZFS helps since if I have to do a hard power cut, I'm reasonably assured that my data will still not be corrupted and if there is a problem, there are pool cleanup and other procedures to mitigate the problem.
I run with mainly 16TB Seagate EXOS hard drives in the HDD drive bays as a RAID 5. The SSD bays are all 1 TB Seagate Ironwolf which houses ZFS Storage Pool 1 (applications and other critical stuff like VMs and containers) in a RAID 5 array. There are two 1 TB M.2 drives on the motherboard for ZFS cache. There is really no point in having a machine like this without a ZFS SSD cache.
I use the machine for Plex, Roon (music), file service, VMs and containers. I have 96 GB of RAM installed which brings me to one important bug concerning ZFS. ZFS requires more memory than EXT4 to operate and there is a system variable called ARC (adaptive replacement cache) to determine how much RAM to give to ZFS for better performance. The problem is the user is given a choice from 45% to 75% of system memory for ZFS and it defaults to 75%. This makes sense in a 16 GB machine where ZFS needs a lot of resources as a percentage of the machine. But it was vexing in the early days of usage wondering why my machine with all this RAM was having a hard time running a Windows Server 2019 VM with 16 GB of RAM allocated (or other things I wanted to run). After QNAP support told me to adjust ARC down to 45%, things got much better, but I have to think that 45% of 96 GB is still way more than ZFS needs on my machine. I'm told this will be fixed in a later version but it has not been changed as of 5.0,1
ZFS features compression and deduplication, but in practice for me, I don't see a ton of benefit. Most of the data I keep is compressed anyway and there isn't a lot of duplicated files. I do keep it on in most cases since there is a minor benefit and it doesn't seem to have a hit on performance since QNAP is using the built in compression features of the XEON W processor. For things like my VM shared folder, I keep it off since I figure it will do more harm than good. But it's nice that shared folders can be individually configured to use compression, dedup, or neither.
QNAP has been pillaried about their security posture and rightfully so. This past year was painful to watch as many users fell victim to multiple QLOCKER and DEADBOLT ransomware attacks. I don't keep my machines open to the internet so I got through it unscathed. But it was a lesson on proper management, the risks of open ports and people's lack of a good backup strategy. Things are getting better with the introduction of the security counselor, closing many holes that were open by default and more warnings when actions by the user posts risks. But only time will tell if the tide has turned on this.
Right now, I am getting used to using docker containers. QNAP's container station is supposed to be a nice UI to make the process easier to configure and manage and it does to a certain extent, although Portainer is more powerful. It is possible to run both Container Station and Portainer to manage docker containers which is what I've done and it's still a work in progress as I learn more.
The only other main problem I have with this unit is an occasional file service performance problem where some writes to the system come to a crawl if you copy a file into a folder as opposed to the top level of a shared folder. I'm not sure if the issue is a client side or server side problem, but I continue to investigate it.
Very informative, thank you! I was actually looking at going with that NAS at some point and running Hero, but for me I'm sized just right for now after watching this video.
so detailed i've saved this to my "nas stuff" playlist for reference. Lotta stuff for a novice so it might be useful to view multiple times and if i decide to go with a qnap, when i'm starting to use it and set up security settings.
Cool video. Thank you. I'm a complete newbie, actually not even a newbie yet, since I haven't even bought a NAS yet... But I HAVE been contemplating buying one, or a DIY solution. I have watched quite a few of your videos and the more I watch, the more I learn, the more I try things out, the less inclined I am to go the NAS route. Currently running my iMac Pro (2017) with 3 SATA SSDs attached (SATA to USB adapters/cables), plus 1 NVME in an ACASIS 40Gbps Thunderbolt 3 enclosure, plus a 4 TB IronWolf Pro in a docking station (USB connected), and finally another 14 TB IronWolf Pro in another USB docking station. (There's an old 1TB Seagate Barracuda HDD in another USB enclosure too, but that one is a quite old HDD that I just keep it around and connected because, well, it hasn't died on me yet.) I did install TrueNAS in a VM using Parallels, and it was interesting to experiment with it, learn a bit. Circling back to this video specifically, and after having experimented with TrueNAS in my VM lab setting, I find this interface very busy... TrueNAS is probably much less intuitive, and possibly more limited, but it seems a lot less cluttered... My two cents, again, from a "not even newbie". :-)
Rob
What do you use SSD’S for? Due to limited life cycles I do not want them to fail prematurely but I like the speed!!
Thanks as usual for your wonderful explanations!
Thanks for this informative video Robbie! As primarily a Synology user, I finally pulled the trigger on the TVS-h674. I’ve got lots of questions (perhaps some concerns) and this video helps to understand the ZFS operating system for Qnap. Right now I’m struggling to make the full leap to move all my data from a DS1621+ to Qnap. In a perfect world (my perfect world) I’d be running DSM on the TVS-h674.
Thanks for the tremendous vote of confidence man, genuinely (and hugely) appreciated! This was a big, big video to setup and create a workflow for - especially when it's for quite a niche/higher end solution. Thanks for continuing to be awesome bud!
I did the same as you, moved from the ds1621xs+ to the qnap tvs-h674-i5, I did it for the lack of quality of streaming in the Synology nas, my Qnap Tvs-h674 it is a different level not reachable by the ds1621xs+ ... in my case I am like you, Iike better the Dsm than the Quts, I still cannot get the configuration I want with my clients (basically my family) in order to back up videos and fotos like the way Dsm does, my time is very limited and I work with my Qnap in my free time, with the Dsm just in 2 or 3 days everything was set up and running, well I did sacrifice hardware for software, honestly the only thing that make me happy is when I do streaming videos in a 4k quality, specifically after the installation I did to my nas using the Nvidia Quadro P2000, at the very beginning was RECOMMENDED BY QNAP PART COMPATIBILITY WEBSITE, and a few days later after I did install it on my system was removed from their website because of the size was a little bit big and it was touching one of the connectors, lol I made it fit, and I don't regret it works like a charming, I think we have to wait and see when Qnap will do a new OS capable to compete with DSM. You are not alone😞
@@07Review Yeah I'm still struggling as well trying to get everything working as I'd hoped. I ended up with an RTX A2000 (after watching your creative video) which fit perfectly in the NAS, however its not on the list as compatible. I was able to get it natively with QTS to passthrough for Plex Transcoding, but I'd hope to use it with Virtualization Station and pass it through to a VM. However, its not compatible or on the approved list. Hoping that maybe in a future update it will be allowed to be passed thru to a VM. Not exactly holding my breath though.
@Brian Free the Funny thing was that the Nvidia Quadro P2000 was on their Qnap compatibility list on October 2022.... that's why I bought it, and funnier when I found out it didn't fit, well I have no other choice other than make surgery 😅, I was undecided but honestly when I did check the amazing kind of card is the Quadro p2000 5g for this system I took the risk, it is a professional grade, I don't regret my decision, I still laugh about it 🤣 😂 😆
Thanks for you video. Very good. I have TVS-h874 64GB (memory Kingston) 8 bay NAS connected to TL-D800S and TL-D800C. Total 24 bays for 3,5" drivers. Works perfect. TL-D800C is used to make big RAID 1/5 for OLD 2..8TB hard discs to give them 2nd life.
Many thanks. Having just purchased a TS-873A with 32GB ECC installed to potentially replace a TrueNas setup I'm certainly swinging back and forth over QTS or QuTS. If it was fully populated with the same drive type I'd prob go QuTS, but as there is a mixed back of drives I'm leaning towards QTS. Usage is SMB and iSCSI based storage. 4 x 4TB Red Plus, 2 x Dell Hitatchi 12TB, 2 x 1TB Red NVMe, 2 x 1.6TB Dell SSD are the drives kicking around. Oh and 3 x 3TB Red Plus drives too. vMware proving the hypervisor with iSCSI strorage.
when will the TVS-h874 i9 be available in the UK - only seeing the i5 ? CPU score is amazing for the i9 - I thought my TVS-h1688X was a beast but no longer with the i9 h874!
any recommendations on a 4 bay NAS? I had a synology 920+ and it had many problems with Time Machine. I am thinking of truenas . . . but really expensive for just a box. Now I am looking at QNAP. Thoughts?
great !👋 is there also the possibility to secure the access to NAS with a YubiKey? 🔑
I feel even more on the ropes about making a choice between 4-6 bay TS-x64 and 6-8 bay TVS-hx74 now.
Just still want to see what that quiet little TS-x64 can and cannot handle as a storage NAS and multimedia/VM station. Also waiting to see if the i7 and i9 Intel core CPU's for the TVS-hx74 become more available by the end of January 2023. Choices, choices...
If you only have 2 SSD, is it better to use them as the first system drive pool or better to use them both as cache only?
I have the new QNAP TVS-h674-i5-32G-US 6 Bay on order. 4 WD 20TB Red Pro drives, and 2 SAMSUNG 980 PRO 500GB PCIe 4.0 NVMe M.2 SSDs. My plan was to use the 2 NVMe SDDs for cache. (is it better to use them for the first storage/system pool instead/) Should and Can I dedicate just 1 (instead of 2) to cache and the remaining second one to the System drive? Or since I have 2 bays free, should I add a 2.5 SSD there for the System pool. (does the system pool work on one drive or does it need two drives?) I plan on setting up RAID 5 from what I'm reading I think. Bit of a newbie, coming from a Windows Stablebit Drivepool setup.
Granted, it is by no means DSM v7.1 but for a long-time QTS user, it all looks extremely similar between QTS & QuTS Hero.
Kudos for QNAP going down that route!
Also a fastly improvement over the previous version (v4) for QuTS Hero in my opinion.
I personally really like I can take (technical) control over my configuration.
Compared to, from what I know, for DSM.
BTW, next to the good suggestion(s) you made for security (2FA, IP-access lockdown etc), I strongly recommend also to enforce SMB3 in the config. Most modern-day OS can handle SMB3 for shares etc just fine and is, at the moment, more secure..
Just sharing my suggestions & experiences.
I am migrating from EXT4 to ZFS, the benefits outweigh, for me, the learning-curve.
Once again (and as always) remarkably valid points dude. One thing that became apparent to me as I was setting up the timeline for this vid was that QuTS has definitely improved in some backend ways since I first used it. Lots of QoL bits, the fluidity since it first arrived compared with QTS at the same time, that kind of thing. Plus the ZFS utilities are much more pronounced and visible that Hero at launch. All this said..the increased licencing and QVR Elite still rather bum me out
@@nascompares Yes, it is apparent QNAP did put some good efforts into QuTS Hero. (v5).
As for the licensing, I'm afraid that is the reality of nowadays that many manufacturers have as a chosen route to make more of a revenue-stream. I do hope QNAP will reconsider QVR's future. On the other hand, they do get more money this way that they can (and should) invest in further development of QVR.
Yes, it is positive thinking for something that is not really very nice about licensing in general noqadays.
Just a shame that QVR Pro is still 8 licenses...but EXT4. The main selling point of 'Elite' is that it is significantly more hardware efficient...but for a ZFS system, you want some horsepower under the bonnet... A odd conflict
@@nascompares Indeed! And thank you so much on behalf of many users I'm sure, of pointing that out!
I will refrain of stating here what I really think of that move other than QNAP's Marketing sometimes seems to be working in a very different way. But then the prelude was quite clear with QTS 4.x & QVR Pro, you could sense something was up with the upcoming QTS 5.
In my perfect world I would like to see the love-child that would have been born from QNAP's hardware & Synology's software.
I can dream, sometimes farfetched outside reality within this galaxy, haha.
BTW, I can't say it often enough but your videos are always very informative for all and have been, to me, candid discussions with very valuable information.
Danke!
Thank you MASSIVELY for taking the time and inclination to donate to NASCompares. I do really struggle to efficiently articulate why it's such a big deal if/when people do. You could have just watched the vid, skipped the YT ads, garnered the knowledge/content, then legged it...but you didn't ..you were one of the people that threw us a tip! Thanks man. You are a good chap and I hope good things happen to you! Oh..and beer! I hope good and interesting beer happens to you! Have a great week
QuTS still does not support RAID expansion with an individual disk.
How reliable are these devices? What happens if NAS psu fails or at worse, NAS motherboard fails? How to i get my data back fast, or at all?
The most important proverb is: "a NAS is not a backup" !
So you must have at least a backup of your NAS, on another NAS or on spare disks.
By the way: do you have a backup of your PC files ?....
@@elodiecemoi3057 I am obviously a backup nerd using custom sync software, with 4x mirrored data. But if the backup solution is not realtime, crucial files may be lost. Same issue with bluddy macbook "pros". Whatever fails, and you have lost tge data forever, unless an ultra high specialty technician rips the ssd chips from the mobo and successfully reads them...
@@constantinosschinas4503 I understand and agree !
cool
Can I put this software on my TVS872XT it has an i5
You should have that option now, yeah (check the downloadable OS options at QNAP for that NAS). However, be warned, it's a FULL system format to change over from EXT4 to ZFS
@@nascompares Indeed, I have been using QuTS Hero v5 on our TVS872XT's (with i5's) and really, really like it.
Important notes: 8Gb RAM minimum is recommended but for the money (= not too expensive) I would opt for 16Gb if possible. Also very, very important, it is strongly recommended to use an UPS with ZFS.
*point upwards* what he said!
@@InspectorGadget2014 I have 16GB and it’s connected to a UPS. The OS is loaded onto 2No. 2TB Nvme in raid 1. I like to have the OS on the main drives that are in raid 5 and use the Nvme for caching but don’t know how to set that up.
@@jerseypaul7323 You have then plenty of memory and a bit too much NVMe, you could next time opt for 500GB for that matter. Unless you fill your QNAP fully with high-capacity HDD's (bigger than 10TB or so). And the majority of your files are under 2TB in size. Are you also going to use SSD's for the QuTS Hero operating system? That is highly recommended and you will notice the performance-improvement. Unfortunately, those SSD's (I recommend 2x in RAID 1) will take-up 2x slots for your HDD's.
If possible I would also recommend using the 10GBe network as that would also improve performance overall.
Back to your question; setting-up caching within QuTS is rather simple, the GUI will guide you thru it, step-by-step.
It is located via Storage & Snapshots > Storage > Cache Acceleration (read acceleration is recommended)
If you g00gle for "quts hero caching" QNAP has written-out a whole help-page with extensive comments with all the pro's, con's and requirements. Alternatively, I would recommend raising your query on NASCompares forum, as YT does limit the space to write-up an extensive explanation here. Important to remember, your NVMe's can used for either the QNAP OS or for caching, but never both at the same time. (unless you use 1x NVMe for the OS and 1x for caching, which is really not a recommended practice, if QuTS Hero allows for that).
I thought this lacked a detailed explanation of why someone would want ZFS over ext4 in the first place
In fairness to Robbie, it wasn't meant to be a comparative presentation and there was a lot to get through. But, I do very much agree that a separate video comparing the two would be most welcome.
*points upwards* yes, what he said. But yeah, I should probably make a comparison on this. I've added this to my (scarily long) to do list
1:12:02 well maybe it's not "detailed" but i found this a nice explanation of why a home user might prefer ext4.
I used to use an QNAP-TS 809 czcams.com/video/x3KPuzYC-7E/video.html