TVS-h1288x / TVS-h1688x

[Charlie olivier]

Really considering the TVS-h1288x for January, but still doing a bit of research before making a final decision.

Will be my first QNAP if I pull the plug on this. Couple of questions I have and seem difficulty in finding clarity.

Transcoding is extremely important to me. What GPU can I through at this, only LP or standard height, single slot or dual slot. I presume from my current understanding that it can take a standard height, dual slot GPU. In this instance I need to move the Ethernet card over to the left hand side which supports LP.
- Is this correct?
- Is the LP mounting bracket for the Ethernet card included or must I source one? (Difficult in my neck of the woods)
- Does it support GTX 1660, RTX 20XX, RTX30xx, RTX 4000 (maybe ideal current choice depending on what comes next from NVIDIA)?

Is QNAP as sticky with their RAM as what Synology is? Synology only supports genuine Synology RAM, but there are work arounds with Synology you just need to take care.
- Can I buy non QNAP RAM that is supported by the CPU? Or do I have to Google-Fu and find RAM like with the Synology to trick it into thinking it has genuine Synology RAM installed?

Can I upgrade the CPU (if and when budget allows) to something like a XEON w-1290 or am I stuck with the CPU it ships with?

I obviously have a lot more question marks on my forehead at the moment, but for now these are the ones that are causing me to have sleepless nights trying to make a decision.

Your feedback will be greatly appreciated.

[matthewoliver]

Really considering the TVS-h1288x for January, but still doing a bit of research before making a final decision.

Will be my first QNAP if I pull the plug on this. Couple of questions I have and seem difficulty in finding clarity.

Transcoding is extremely important to me. What GPU can I through at this, only LP or standard height, single slot or dual slot. I presume from my current understanding that it can take a standard height, dual slot GPU. In this instance I need to move the Ethernet card over to the left hand side which supports LP.
- Is this correct?
- Is the LP mounting bracket for the Ethernet card included or must I source one? (Difficult in my neck of the woods)
- Does it support GTX 1660, RTX 20XX, RTX30xx, RTX 4000 (maybe ideal current choice depending on what comes next from NVIDIA)?

Is QNAP as sticky with their RAM as what Synology is? Synology only supports genuine Synology RAM, but there are work arounds with Synology you just need to take care.
- Can I buy non QNAP RAM that is supported by the CPU? Or do I have to Google-Fu and find RAM like with the Synology to trick it into thinking it has genuine Synology RAM installed?

Can I upgrade the CPU (if and when budget allows) to something like a XEON w-1290 or am I stuck with the CPU it ships with?

I obviously have a lot more question marks on my forehead at the moment, but for now these are the ones that are causing me to have sleepless nights trying to make a decision.

Your feedback will be greatly appreciated.

Here's the official compatibility list: https://www.qnap.com/en/compatibility/? ... ategory=25 but I'm sure you can install a 2060 or even a 3060 mini card from Asus or EVGA if you can ever get your hands on one as they're pretty hard to find, bearing in mind the 550W power supply.
The lp bracket is unfortunately not provided, so you'll have to find one and I don't think Qnap has released it yet. If someone knows different, I'm interested too!
No issues in buying non Qnap RAM as long as you stick to DDR4 ECC 3200MHz UDIMM (unregistered) and use 2 sticks for dual channel.
And finally, yes you can upgrade to the W-1290 (I'm planning on doing that later) as it has the same 80W TDP.

[marsar]

Hi everybody,

I purchased the TVS-h1288x to replace my aging server-ish setup, a Windows workstation with a 5TB RAID-5 setup.

I've finished setting it up with 4x 8TB Ultrastar HDDs (RAID6) and 2x 1TB Samsung Evo NVMe as cache a few days ago.
The experience thus far is very underwhelming to say the least, especially performance wise, something I can't even begin to fathom.

Right from the start I noticed that browsing the storage content in File Station feels like browsing an FTP server in the 90', you open a directory and it takes between 1-3 seconds to actually display the content. Doing it from a Windows client wasn't that bad (initially), only sometimes it took ages to display the content of some dirs with just a few files and subdirs. "Oh well I can kinda live with that" I thought, since the sluggishness happened from time to time.

So I configured the two VMs I had running on my previous system (Hyper-V), after launching them the system dashboard reported an overall memory usage of around 55%, which sounds alright, more than enough for the NAS, I thought.
Then I configured snapshots, as I had them in different flavors on my Hyper-V (Previous File Version and the VM-Snapshopts), everything was fine.

That's until the morning after, when I notice that one VM was unreachable and the whole system was almost unresponsive. I logged into the NAS only to find it had apparently ran out of memory and automatically terminated a few processes (stuff that occupied a few hundred MB at max!). I look at the system resources and the RAM still indicated more than 40% available. So I tried to access the Virtualization Station, which didn't respond, I tried to shut its process down, which didn't do anything, I tried to terminate other processes, nothing worked. The SSH service was unavailable too, so I tried to reboot the system. It took the NAS 3, THREE, hours to reboot!
After the reboot everything was apparently OK, I reduced the RAM for both VMs (which BTW is shared) just to be sure.

This morning everything was still online and there where no memory related complains in the log.
So I loaded up my photo editing app to browse a dir with a bit more than 100 photos, it took 10-15 seconds for the content to show up in the app, same thing with Windows-Explorer. Even going up one dir, which contains 5 direct subdirs, takes 3-5 seconds. Even considering all subdirs and files, the whole dir branch doesn't contain more than 500 files and subdirs.

The first thing that came to my mind were the snapshots, as I only configured the VMs and the snapshots before seeing such a drop in performance. So I did some research and apparently enabling them causes a permanent 5-30% drop in performance! Still, even 30% less performance doesn't justify such bad performance. I got rid of the snapshots to see if that would improve performance, to my surprise it didn't!

I thought QNAP to be a professional industry standard, but even my 10 year old windows workstation outperforms this 2500€ expensive pile of useless hardware.

Has anyone had similar experiences or an idea what settings might cause such an issue?

[matthewoliver]

Hi everybody,

I purchased the TVS-h1288x to replace my aging server-ish setup, a Windows workstation with a 5TB RAID-5 setup.

I've finished setting it up with 4x 8TB Ultrastar HDDs (RAID6) and 2x 1TB Samsung Evo NVMe as cache a few days ago.
The experience thus far is very underwhelming to say the least, especially performance wise, something I can't even begin to fathom.

Right from the start I noticed that browsing the storage content in File Station feels like browsing an FTP server in the 90', you open a directory and it takes between 1-3 seconds to actually display the content. Doing it from a Windows client wasn't that bad (initially), only sometimes it took ages to display the content of some dirs with just a few files and subdirs. "Oh well I can kinda live with that" I thought, since the sluggishness happened from time to time.

So I configured the two VMs I had running on my previous system (Hyper-V), after launching them the system dashboard reported an overall memory usage of around 55%, which sounds alright, more than enough for the NAS, I thought.
Then I configured snapshots, as I had them in different flavors on my Hyper-V (Previous File Version and the VM-Snapshopts), everything was fine.

That's until the morning after, when I notice that one VM was unreachable and the whole system was almost unresponsive. I logged into the NAS only to find it had apparently ran out of memory and automatically terminated a few processes (stuff that occupied a few hundred MB at max!). I look at the system resources and the RAM still indicated more than 40% available. So I tried to access the Virtualization Station, which didn't respond, I tried to shut its process down, which didn't do anything, I tried to terminate other processes, nothing worked. The SSH service was unavailable too, so I tried to reboot the system. It took the NAS 3, THREE, hours to reboot!
After the reboot everything was apparently OK, I reduced the RAM for both VMs (which BTW is shared) just to be sure.

This morning everything was still online and there where no memory related complains in the log.
So I loaded up my photo editing app to browse a dir with a bit more than 100 photos, it took 10-15 seconds for the content to show up in the app, same thing with Windows-Explorer. Even going up one dir, which contains 5 direct subdirs, takes 3-5 seconds. Even considering all subdirs and files, the whole dir branch doesn't contain more than 500 files and subdirs.

The first thing that came to my mind were the snapshots, as I only configured the VMs and the snapshots before seeing such a drop in performance. So I did some research and apparently enabling them causes a permanent 5-30% drop in performance! Still, even 30% less performance doesn't justify such bad performance. I got rid of the snapshots to see if that would improve performance, to my surprise it didn't!

I thought QNAP to be a professional industry standard, but even my 10 year old windows workstation outperforms this 2500€ expensive pile of useless hardware.

Has anyone had similar experiences or an idea what settings might cause such an issue?

I'm not seeing any of those issues. My nas is using 75% ram and 40% cpu (from 1 linux VM) and I can still browse files normally, even preview raw photos as if they were on my computer.
Have you checked what SMB version you've configured on the nas?
How much ram do you have?

[marsar]

I'm not seeing any of those issues. My nas is using 75% ram and 40% cpu (from 1 linux VM) and I can still browse files normally, even preview raw photos as if they were on my computer.
Have you checked what SMB version you've configured on the nas?
How much ram do you have?

The NAS comes with 16GB, the SMB version is set to v3, with the minimum being v3 too, as I presume that Win10 (my OS) is on that version by default (will check that).
I have attached a screenshot of the related settings.

Absurdly enough after a reboot, which took 15 minutes before all services and VMs were online again, it feels snappier again.
I have less issues browsing around, but I wouldn't call it acceptable and, sadly, pretty far from feeling as "if they were on my computer", as it still can take several seconds to switch dir.

It feels like the system struggles excessively with most operations.
I deleted a snapshot of one VM, tried to access the other VM and failed because everything became so slow that I couldn't even RDP in.
That VM is just a Windows Server Core installation with 265MB RAM (of which about 2% are in use)!
On the other hand, it's not like the HDDs struggle to deliver decent performance (all four were stress tested before installation).
Transferring large files seems to easily saturate my gigabit network (90-110MB/s).

[matthewoliver]

We have the same exact smb settings, the only difference is I'm on a mac and my VMs are stored on SATA SSDs.
How did you setup the cache?

[marsar]

I pretty much followed the QNAP configuration wizard, just changed the cache mode to "All IO".
By now I also disable deduplication an compression on all shares, in the hope to see some improvements.

[Charlie olivier]

These comments by @marsar scare me, it's a lot of money and I want my NAS to be good for at least the next 5 years.

I'm new to QNAP, what is really pulling me to this is the 3 tier storage. Nvme for cache, 2.5 ssd for apps and VM's, and 3.5 HDD for cold hard storage.

Ideally I would want about 4-5 VM's all of them small and not being used hard all at the same time except for one maybe to be a power house. Obviously I am looking at RAM, GPU and maybe even a CPU.

But reports like this sends chills down my spine.

[rgarjr]

Can I upgrade the CPU (if and when budget allows) to something like a XEON w-1290 or am I stuck with the CPU it ships with?

I obviously have a lot more question marks on my forehead at the moment, but for now these are the ones that are causing me to have sleepless nights trying to make a decision.

Your feedback will be greatly appreciated.

The only way to find out is trial and error. People need to try it in order to know if it can run those processors.

[marsar]

These comments by @marsar scare me, it's a lot of money and I want my NAS to be good for at least the next 5 years.

I'm new to QNAP, what is really pulling me to this is the 3 tier storage. Nvme for cache, 2.5 ssd for apps and VM's, and 3.5 HDD for cold hard storage.

Ideally I would want about 4-5 VM's all of them small and not being used hard all at the same time except for one maybe to be a power house. Obviously I am looking at RAM, GPU and maybe even a CPU.

But reports like this sends chills down my spine.

I must say I bought this quite blindly, something I never do. Working in IT I see their devices are all over the places I work.
And while I've never "knowingly" worked directly with a QNAP NAS before, I guess I just presumed them to be dependable, especially at this price range.
What bothers me the most is that I had way less trouble with my custom 10-year old Windows Hyper-V workstation/server and its Adaptec Hardware RAID than with this NAS.
You know, the little anyoing things, stuff like notifications that automatic pool scrubbing failed (without further details), but when you start it manually it works

Anyway, right now performance is stable enough, after I practically disabled every single resource intensive feature of the NAS and boosted those that should bring more performance.
I deactivated:
- Deduplication
- Compression
- Snapshots (deleted all of them too)
NVMe Cache is now "All IO" (from "Random IO") as this should kinda force caching for every IOPS.
[EDIT] Forgot: I also changed the ZIL Sync IO mode to "none" (best performance with greatest risk of data loss in the event of a power outage).
Initially all of this didn't seem to have any effects at all, after a reboot the NAS was back at what I now call "normal" performance.
Meaning: sometimes I still get to wait a couple seconds when changing directory.

I'm not sure if I'm only too performance spoiled and just expect 2500€ of hardware to "just work".
I expect such things to happen sometimes, while browsing a remote FTP server, not on my LAN.

Right now I'm in talks with QNAP support, let's see what they have to say about this.

[QNAPDanielFL]

I pretty much followed the QNAP configuration wizard, just changed the cache mode to "All IO".
By now I also disable deduplication an compression on all shares, in the hope to see some improvements.

Deduplication can take a lot of RAM and if there is not enough RAM, this can make the unit quite slow.
But if you have enough available RAM that might be the problem. But if deduplication taking up RAM was the problem, I don't expect turning off deduplication would reclaim the RAM. To reclaim RAM, you can make a folder without deduplication with a similar name to the deduplicated folder. Copy everything to the new folder. Then delete the folder with deduplication. Deleting the folder with deduplication is how you reclaim the RAM that deduplication has taken. Turning off deduplication will stop the feature from taking more RAM than it is already taking, but my understanding is it won't release the RAM taken already by deduplication.

[Big09]

The TVS-h1288x just went up 500.00 in price 1999.00 to 2499.00 wow. Feels like retailer's are playing the old high demand price hike game

[marsar]

The TVS-h1288x just went up 500.00 in price 1999.00 to 2499.00 wow. Feels like retailer's are playing the old high demand price hike game

Here in Germany it was nowhere to be found, the only online shop that had a few was selling them for almost 2400€.
I bought it early on a Monday, because I saw a price increase of almost 100€ over the previous weekend!

Deduplication can take a lot of RAM and if there is not enough RAM, this can make the unit quite slow.
But if you have enough available RAM that might be the problem. But if deduplication taking up RAM was the problem, I don't expect turning off deduplication would reclaim the RAM. To reclaim RAM, you can make a folder without deduplication with a similar name to the deduplicated folder. Copy everything to the new folder. Then delete the folder with deduplication. Deleting the folder with deduplication is how you reclaim the RAM that deduplication has taken. Turning off deduplication will stop the feature from taking more RAM than it is already taking, but my understanding is it won't release the RAM taken already by deduplication.

While I understand the concept, I can't say that I know the exact details of how deduplication works.
Didn't see no particular spike in RAM usage after enabling it for the first time, with a storage usage of around 40%, though.

Anyway...
I re-enabled most features, VMs with a total of 9GB RAM, deduplication and compression; just to see if I could get the NAS to reduce it's performance as it did the other day.
No luck, this time everything is working as expected, and that's since yesterday morning. RAM usage is at 61%.
The only thing that I didn't re-enable are the snapshots, which means, either the snapshots caused that massive drop in performance or something strange happened, which makes me even more nervous.

[marsar]

After a few weeks with my new TVS-h1288X all I can say that quality is barely acceptable IMO.
Since this is my first QNAP product I obviously can't tell if this is an abnormality or if all their products are like this.

AFAIK the QuTS Hero OS is rather new and thus it might be part of the reason for all the issues I experienced.
While I luckily didn't have any more major issues, since the RAM problem I mentioned in a previous post,
there are many minor issues that convey a feeling of inferior quality and lack of polish.

Regarding my earlier RAM issue:
Tech support I experienced was well mannered and rather fast in replying to my tickets.
Sadly the technical part is very much lacking IMO.
They started talking about some unclean shutdown, probably meant the very long reboot time after the out-of-memory event.
Attributing that to my HGST Ultrastar HDDs, instead of realizing it was probably the fact the system was out of RAM,
and asking me to replace them, as they aren't on the official QNAP certified-as-supported list.
When I asked how the HDDs could have possibly caused the system to go out-of-memory I was told: "it isn't the NAS, so try to replace them"
The reality is that they didn't find anything obvious in the logs and simply wanted to get rid of the issue.

TL;DR - My advice for buyers: wait and inform yourself, product doesn't remotely feel like it's ready for prime-time and tech support is kinda dubious.

_______________________________________________________________
Some of my experiences so far, ranging from nitpicking to unacceptable:

Things like the scrollbar-arrow hidden behind the status-bar in File Station or
options named like "Restrict the access of Recycle Bin to administrators only for now" make me think that not much effort went into this product.
If you sell your products worldwide you might want to invest in a decent translation.

Several UI-elements use the hand-cursor (usually reserved for web-links), but have no actions bound to them.
Then again some actions, often minor (like changing dir in File Station), take a few seconds to actually be recognizable (on 2500€ worth of server-grade hardware).
This leads to a pretty confusing experience, as one often wonders if the last click did something or not.

Searching by file type in File Station is a nice feature, sadly, often enough the resulting list is inconsistent, showing both files and dirs, when only files should be visible.

If the NAS joins a Windows domain, domain users can, without further need to configure anything, log into the NAS web front-end as expected.
Sadly, since the security group "everyone" doesn't include domain-users, this isn't the case for SMB.
So you have to configure permissions on all required shares, which doesn't sound that bad, until you are confronted by some very strange UI-design choices.
I had to realize that only by enabling "Individual permissions" and setting the "permission style" (which sounds like appearance not behavior) you can actually see some relevant permissions otherwise hidden. Then, as I said above, I had to discover that "everybody" doesn't mean everybody.

Moving approximately 500 large files (0.5-2GB) from one dir to another (both on the NAS), generated several hundred move tasks,
despite the fact that I requested them to be merged into a single task (there's an option for that in the move-window).
At the end it did copy roughly half of the files and ignored the rest, why I don't know, no errors in the log.
It took a few hours to move 300GB on a HDD-RAID that usually peaks at around 200MB/s for sequential read.

[OneCD]

Attributing that to my HGST Ultrastar HDDs, instead of realizing it was probably the fact the system was out of RAM,
and asking me to replace them, as they aren't on the official QNAP certified-as-supported list.
When I asked how the HDDs could have possibly caused the system to go out-of-memory I was told: "it isn't the NAS, so try to replace them"
The reality is that they didn't find anything obvious in the logs and simply wanted to get rid of the issue.

QNAP are unable to support every combination of hardware, and so will look for the first piece of unsupported hardware installed in a NAS and blame it for the problems present. This is not uncommon in tech-support.

Always ensure you either use items specifically stated as supported by QNAP, or be prepared to install them (at-least temporarily) to test for the same fault.

Then again some actions, often minor (like changing dir in File Station), take a few seconds to actually be recognizable (on 2500€ worth of server-grade hardware).

Which is quite a cheap "server". A real server costs many times that. QNAP are budget NAS (even the expensive ones). Apples-and-oranges.

Moving approximately 500 large files (0.5-2GB) from one dir to another (both on the NAS), generated several hundred move tasks,
despite the fact that I requested them to be merged into a single task (there's an option for that in the move-window).
At the end it did copy roughly half of the files and ignored the rest, why I don't know, no errors in the log.
It took a few hours to move 300GB on a HDD-RAID that usually peaks at around 200MB/s for sequential read.

Was the NAS doing anything else at the time? Media indexing? Transcoding? RAID scrubbing? etc...