QNAP NAS Community Forum

The drives from these will soon be available separately and would be good if there were support for them:

http://www.hitachigst.com/press-room/20 ... ard-drives

http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.jsp?l ... 48090aRCRD

Why would you think that QNAP wouldn't already be working on 4TB drive support?

Why do you think 4 TB drives need special support in general? There is nothing specific ... However, the smaller Intel NAS were pure 32-bit units, while the ones with five* and more bays have 64-Bit Kernels - what is required to handle storage volumes > 16 TB. So this should fit up to 8 TB drives, beyond the two bay units will need 64-bit Kernels, too.

*TS-509 does remain excluded from support of drives > 2 TB.

schumaku wrote:Why do you think 4 TB drives need special support in general? There is nothing specific ... However, the smaller Intel NAS were pure 32-bit units, while the ones with five* and more bays have 64-Bit Kernels - what is required to handle storage volumes > 16 TB. So this should fit up to 8 TB drives, beyond the two bay units will need 64-bit Kernels, too.

*TS-509 does remain excluded from support of drives > 2 TB.

Scumaku Whre can you se which model have which kernel?

I have a TS459 Pro II and cant find it in the datasheets

sterp wrote:I have a TS459 Pro II and cant find it in the datasheets

Why - does your TS-459 Pro II have five or more bays?

schumaku wrote:

sterp wrote:I have a TS459 Pro II and cant find it in the datasheets

Why - does your TS-459 Pro II have five or more bays?

No its a 4 bay unit
But is it the number of bays that determine if the kernel is 32 or 64 bit ?

sterp wrote:But is it the number of bays that determine if the kernel is 32 or 64 bit ?

Yes, as mentioned before.

[/quote] Yes, as mentioned before.[/quote]


Yes and thats what I dont understand.
If I look at my windows PC, I can choose to install a 32 or 64 bit OS. On the PC this is nothing to do with the number of drives

Sory if this is basic knowledge, but I dont get it

With QNAP you get the OS your system is designed and specified for...same as when you buy a PC with a OEM Windows where you get either a 32 bit _or_ a 64 bit version.

schumaku wrote:With QNAP you get the OS your system is designed and specified for...same as when you buy a PC with a OEM Windows where you get either a 32 bit _or_ a 64 bit version.

Okay, Thanks
But is this written somewhere in the brochures, havent seen it.
If I had Known that I might have bought a 5 bay unit instead

why? what does it matter if the os is 32-bit or 64-bit?
I expect the 4-drive nas you have will be fully compatable with 4tb drives, and maybe even bigger in the future. Who cares how many bits the underlying OS uses?

sl1000 wrote:why? what does it matter if the os is 32-bit or 64-bit?
I expect the 4-drive nas you have will be fully compatable with 4tb drives, and maybe even bigger in the future. Who cares how many bits the underlying OS uses?

Will a 64 bit unit not run faster that a 32 bit ?

Lol, no not at all. The amount of bits the operating system is has nothing to do with speed.

sl1000 wrote:Lol, no not at all. The amount of bits the operating system is has nothing to do with speed.

Ok, then im more relaxed.
Sorry for my lack of knowledge

sl1000 wrote:The amount of bits the operating system is has nothing to do with speed.

Au contraire, long-word OSs are very much about speed/performance - albeit limited to niche scenarios fairly unlikely to occur in NAS.

FTR, the 2 main (CPU-dependent) benefits of very long instruction words are ...
* The ability to crunch larger numbers at a stroke (rather than have to waste time breaking them down and separately processing the pieces before finally assembling the result)
* Alternately to present more small instructions at once for parallel processing (PP)
... both, you'll note, primarily aimed at processing jobs significantly faster.

But whilst NAS may perhaps employ such huge numbers for addressing and data integrity checks, I suspect PP's restriction to wholly-independent process threads largely rules it out for core NAS functions - even if any QNAP CPUs support PP (something I haven't checked). Except for specialist heavy-duty applications, like crunching weather data through meteorological models, 64-bit OSs only really come into their own in the traditional corporate role of consecutively serving groups of users independently sat at remote client terminals.

Thus I agree 64-bit OSs aren't a NAS goal worth chasing - but for more complex reasons which allow sterp to continue relaxing whilst choking down less humble pie.