QNAP NAS Community Forum

Hi,

I am thinking about upgrading from the super old and slow Syn. DS409+ to an QNAP x72.

What is not clear to me is how the (apparently many) external ports can be utilized. For example, with a 472 it would seem natural to fit 4 spinners into it, and that leaves not much options for additional SSDs, i.e. it's either cache or dedicated volume.

So how are externally connected devices handled? If I plug one or several Samsung T5 SSDs into the USB ports, can they be configured just as the internal ones? Could they even be configured as RAID, or as SSD cache for internals?

How much is the penalty in performance? (You can easily plug in externals that saturate the USB speed.)

From what I've read so far, the TR-004 expansion units are quite limited in the speed they provide (like 250ish MB/s) - why is that?

Thank you!

external drives cannot be part of your raid..mostly used for backup targets

tr004 is limited by the amount of disks and the speed of the huiltin eaid controller (besides the actual usb interface)


if you want more disks and flexibility..maybe upgrade to a larger NAS

You could also use the TX-500/800P Thunderbolt expansion chassis (TB2). These will give you higher throughput values.

The TR-004 has an embedded 3Gb SATA Raid controller, so that along with USB overhead, etc. it what helping limit the speed.

You best bet though is to go with a bigger model like the TS-672/872 as they likely will be the same if not cheaper price once you factor in the expansion chassis's, and will give you the best overall performance/storage flexibility.

Thank you so far for your thoughts. Yes, starting off with a bigger one is probably the way to go.

So the usefulness of these ports seem rather dubious, at least in that number.

But then, I never understood the need for two or three HDMI ports on a NAS other than "being cool and doing non-nassy-stuff".

So question still remains: what *can* you actually do with the (storage) devices connected via USB ports? The manuals of the device or OS are not much of a help here either. With a device at hands, it's probably quite clear when going through the menus.

Main uses are as follows: Secondary Storage volume (think main system = C drive, external chassis = D drive), backup volume for data from Main system (Raid isn't backups), etc.

Some people will keep their critical/performant stuff on the main volume, and use an external chassis for media (Music, TV, Movies, etc.) where since you are generally streaming that content, the performance needs aren't that high. VM's they would run them on the main unit where speed matters.

I guess that will need some more thoughts on my part.

There are so many options available... and my use case is pretty vague even for myself at the moment.