QNAP firmware issues : Major file system bug

[doktornotor]

Just move on (to another brand). I sold the faulty unit (before this issue becomes well-known, now that it is it might be more difficult -you know who to blame-) and I'm happy with my new Syno unit bought on 2011/02.

Thanks but no, thanks. I just moved from that brand. Among others, their crappy Samba v3.2.8 has been causing AD compatibility nightmares and generally horrible performance with the 2008 R2 domain controller and all those W7 clients.

Frankly - back to basics, next time instead of NAS we are going to build our own boxes for the purpose. Those will not have any fancy management GUI but at least you can install whatever you want on them easily.

[sh4d0wt3ch]

Just move on (to another brand). I sold the faulty unit (before this issue becomes well-known, now that it is it might be more difficult -you know who to blame-) and I'm happy with my new Syno unit bought on 2011/02.

Thanks but no, thanks. I just moved from that brand. Among others, their crappy Samba v3.2.8 has been causing AD compatibility nightmares and generally horrible performance with the 2008 R2 domain controller and all those W7 clients.

Frankly - back to basics, next time instead of NAS we are going to build our own boxes for the purpose. Those will not have any fancy management GUI but at least you can install whatever you want on them easily.

I was using a TS-412 for maybe 3 months until I hit the same bug as I have posted in quite a few threads in this forum. I can't wait and bought a Synology appliance; this time a 12-bay solution and never looked back. At the moment I still have my TS-412 decommissioned and waiting until this gets fixed as I don't want to sell it knowing that the next person will hit the same bug. BTW I am only using this on my home network 3TB X 12 (RAID 6) so I haven't encountered any problem with regards to AD and server authentication.

Personally I even wouldn't suggest any of these brands to be used on a corporate environment where you utilize it for mission-critical data, for that we always use these products

Dell PowerVault http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/powervault-md3000/pd
NetApp http://www.netapp.com/us/

[Mforcer]

I have absolutely no experience with putting together an OS but why isn't there more activity in porting something like FreeNAS to QNAP and other commercial NAS systems? If I understand correctly, there is nothing too special about the hardware but there are very few options when it comes to putting together a small, efficient, multi-bay NAS with off-the-shelf parts. Why don't QNAP simply ship a FreeNAS derived system? Does anyone buy QNAP for their software?

[joelang1699]

Just move on (to another brand). I sold the faulty unit (before this issue becomes well-known, now that it is it might be more difficult -you know who to blame-) and I'm happy with my new Syno unit bought on 2011/02.

I reported this problem on 2010/07 already!!: viewtopic.php?f=45&t=33431

I waited 7 months (!!, seriously, totally unacceptable) to get a working solution. Here it's even worse, some of you have been waiting for almost 18 months. I work in computers on little jobs here and there for medium-sized companies, this issue is now quite well-known and from what I gathered qnap lost some sales in ~1.5 year because of that.

What are you waiting for ? A miracle ? Companies love people like you. You can't blame them for bs'ing you since you're so willing to believe anything.

Im waiting on QNAP sorting out their dodgey product line i.e. not a mircale. You sound as if their justified in some way for lying to us. I dont know where you get the idea im ready to believe anything seen as im the one who called BS on their Q1 promise as few months back. Companies love people like you who seem to be okay with the fact that their sub standard.

[Stin]

Since there has been no sign of a fix for this, I think I had better get myself another NAS.
Any recommendations for a 2 bay nas solution (that works)?

[forkless]

*snip* What are you waiting for ? A miracle ? Companies love people like you. You can't blame them for bs'ing you since you're so willing to believe anything.

Things aren't always that simple. Some people don't have the money to invest into a new NAS, warranty expires, data sets are getting so large you can't migrate in a normal fashion. It's nice if you have a two bay NAS, try migrating 10 bay RAID-5 set... backup solutions are not always a viable or cost effective solution for the home power user.

So yes, I can see how people can get 'stuck'.

[chrisqncl]

Hi,

there is Debian for quite a few QNAP devices incl. ARM based like TS-41x.
See http://www.cyrius.com/debian/kirkwood/qnap

-chris

[BloodShed]

I had upgraded to 3.6.1 since someone mentioned it appears to be better. Sadly, the freezing problem continues for me.

I avoid the NAS like the plague now. Not only does freezing render the device frustratingly unusable, the reports of potential data loss make me nervous. I have 7TB of data on this worthless hardware.

We're sorry about the late response as it took some time to prepare the testing environment.
Based on our preliminary study, a newer Linux kernel does exhibit faster performance.
(Edit: faster performance when the NAS is almost full).

Some official communication from QNAP?! While I'd love to be happier about this, there's no excuse for not keeping customers informed on some sort of reasonable basis. Honestly, I don't appreciate the attempt at making an excuse.

And frankly, "preparing a testing environment" is a poor excuse considering the excessive time frame in question. Even if, for the sake of argument, you were setting up a testing environment for at least five months (the amount of time since we last heard a word from QNAP in here)... you still could have kept us updated on the status!

Further, I'm alarmed by the claim of "faster performance". This does not sound like the solution to the reported problem. The problem is not slow performance. The problem is constant freezing of HDD access.

My patience is at it's limit. I've been dealing with this issue for over a year while the problem continued to get worse! Meanwhile, QNAP avoids the problem and the customers. I'm willing to wait until July for the updated kernel. If it's still broken, I'm finished. I'm buying another product, transfering my data, and selling this junk on eBay. Obviously I'll be making every effort to get the word out before QNAP claims any more victims.

I don't normally get this angry, but considering how QNAP has handled this issue, I'm actually amazed I've held it together this long.

[grocovid]

I'm wondering if we are all encountering the same problem here. Many people refer to "data loss", unusable device, freezing of hdd access".

I've had this problem twice now, when the NAS is 95% full. For me, with the bug I encounter (and I'm not saying it is the same as for other participants in this thread), my TS-412 is fully functional for the first 90% of HD capacity. And when I reach 90%, I get angry and frustrated like all of you. But come on, I would have hit the ceiling a couple of weeks later with a non-buggy hardware. Of course, it is extremely annoying (I've still got 100 GB free, and I had to give up copying a 4 GB file from my laptop to the NAS, after attempting for a whole night - 8 hours connected using 1GB ethernet ! - 50-60 KB files taken individually still work though). And of course it should be a priority for QNAP.

BUT still I've bought a second NAS, still a QNAP TS-412, because I am running out of space. What I'm thinking here is that some of us are transferring their frustration of running out of disk space on a fauly NAS software (and again, it IS annoying, it shouldn't take so long, ... - I agree with you guys), since we run out of space sooner than we expected. When choosing my new NAS, I compared with the competition - correcting for the fact that with QNAP I will only be able to use 90% of my disk space - and still QNAP is the best deal.

grocovid

[AdrianW]

...But come on, I would have hit the ceiling a couple of weeks later with a non-buggy hardware.

I've had this problem for over 18 months - it started when I still had around 60% available space (and that's with 8 x 2TB drives in Raid 6 - a total of 12TB, so I had around 6TB available!, still a very long way from the "ceiling" as you put it.

It still stalls for around 40 seconds at the start of a copy, halting ALL access for me and other users - very annoying if someone is watching a video at the time.

[grocovid]

That's exactly why I think there may be at least two different problems here. For me, the problem is easy to reproduce: free some disk space (>5-10%), problem disappears. If I free just 1 GB in my terrible situation (freezes all the time), I can re-use that 1 GB without any trouble. Moreover, in my situation, it doesn't just stall at the start of a copy, but also periodically during the copy (every 1 MB now - used to be every 95 MB).

grocovid

[mmi144]

This is completely unacceptable for a company who's main product is NAS devices. This problem effects all of the NAS units, causes serious loss of performance/functionality and can cause data corruption or loss. In other words for a NAS company this should be a critical, must-solve problem. Yet its been going on for a year and QNAP still has no fix for it. Their most recent post indicates a new firmware for x86 devices in July with no date for ARM devices and no indication if this actually resolves the problem and eliminates the data corruption or if it only "improves performance". How can you be a serious NAS vendor and not just about literally drop everything to fix this? Rumor has it prior firmware revisions didn't have this problem, so why not at least push out a new firmware that's actually based on the old version that worked properly? Does performance and data reliability matter this little to QNAP as a company?

I bought a TS-559 ProII unit 2 months ago that I'm running in RAID6. Really wish I had known about this issue before so I could have purchased from a different vendor who cared about the reliability of my data. The device itself seems to be fine currently, but its only running it at 40% of disk capacity currently. Once it gets higher I'm gong to start really worrying about my data. Why would I pay that kind of money to run RAID6 if I knew the device itself had a flaw that could corrupt my data? I was choosing between Synology and QNAP and picked QNAP because I *thought* they had the better actual NAS where Synology seemed to have better applications and other bells and whistles. Seems I was wrong and Synology must have the better everything.

By the way, in April QNAP support posted a message that included this statement, "We're sorry about the late response as it took some time to prepare the testing environment.". That was 9 months after this issue was posted. It took QNAP 3/4ths of a year just to put together a testing environment? Shouldn't they already have a testing environment? I'd expect a company who's primary business is NAS to have a lab environment with at least multiple NAS systems, networks and a variety of clients to perform testing. I'd expect that their NAS systems be thoroughly tested, bench marked and data reliability verified before they released new firmware or devices. This sort of obvious, across-the-board flaw in the firmware should never have made it into production in the first place. To let it fester and continue to jeopardize their customers for a year is just shocking.

In an effort to help others not make the same mistake I'm posting this issue conspicuously everywhere I can and warning people not to trust QNAP products. This is very sad and I don't like doing this. But how can anyone reasonable react differently given the incredibly poor effort put out by QNAP to resolve this after a year. QNAP, you give me no other choice.

[grocovid]

Come on, QNAP guys, I feel like I'm your sales rep here, while I'm just one of those guys who happens to encounter this "major file system bug" and who only tries to have a balanced outlook on this.

It seems that MOST occurrences of the issue are related to NAS running at almost full capacity. There seems to be exceptions though.

When the problem occurs, it certainly causes loss of performance and functionality. But I've yet find a reasonable explanation on how it can cause data corruption or loss. It seems to be something users post to scare QNAP. The problem is serious. They seem to have a hard time reproducing it. As a software developer, I know how hard-to-reproduce problems are hard to fix. They should put more effort into this, but mostly they SHOULD COMMUNICATE WITH US. Please, QNAPAlex or someone, get involved in this discussion !

Grocovid

[2000wolf]

Since there has been no sign of a fix for this, I think I had better get myself another NAS.
Any recommendations for a 2 bay nas solution (that works)?

The Syno DS-212+ together with it's DSM 4.0 is pretty nice. However I can not confirm that it has no issues because I know it only with a 15% load
... and it has a plastics touch.

[heroheroz]

Well, moving to another brand isnt a bad idea, however I think this actually do the forum admin a favor
I guess the forum admin can't even actually talk to the kernel developer that has been outsourced to India or Mars who care no shxt / no idea about what's the problem.

The only time they response obviously is someone post the contact of the CEO, even so, they only replied once, and without answering the question.

Moving toward another brand just reduce the voice of this suffering group so can ignore us more easily, as I really get stuck, i.e. data size is not easily migrate / backup, I got no choice financially.

I suggest to people who suffer from the same problem simply find a few review forums and put the fact there, the only way to make them care is let their potential customer know about it and make qnap lose their business.
Don't just post your feedback here, people don't usually come to this qnap forum. I am starting with the most famous global gadget review forum, then to other famous forum, post a "no update / fix from qnap" every week there, this can make a difference. Please let me know what forum is popular as I do not read the whole internet. Simply add into the list and I will add my voice there.
This is the only way to make our problem to be their problem. This can negate the effect of millions $$ they try to put into advertising and secret under table deals with suppliers, and their management may realize it is a priority.

Here is a few suggestion:

global:
cnet - http://forums.cnet.com/
toms hardware - http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/
overclockers - http://www.overclockers.com/forums/

aussie:
whirlpool - http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/
OCAU - http://forums.overclockers.com.au/
product review - http://www.productreview.com.au

hk: (feel free to use translate.google.com for other language)
hkgolden - http://forum.hkgolden.com

tw: (feel free to use translate.google.com for other language)
mobile01 - http://www.mobile01.com/forumtopic.php?c=17&s=6

I will post the thread for each forum there when I am less angry, so people here can all express their disappointment, let the news spread to the end of the world.