TVS-882 and QM2 card

[karels74]

Wow I'm impressed that the Squid card worked in your QNAP TVS-682. Did you run into any issues installing it (either physical as in it's large size, or having QTS recognize the drives)?

It fits the x4 pcie with a lot of spare space left. Its not a big card especially when you remove the (very) noisy fan that comes with it, but it fits with the fan too. Mind I am using the noctua nh-l12 1 fan setup for the cpu. I dont think the NAS starts/boots when only this card with nvme's is present. I always had to have 1 more drive in there (ssd for example). Curiously enough the additional drive does not even have to be formatted for the NAS to start. It is possible to install apps on the card (virtualisation station) and run/boot VMs off it, which is my main usecase for the nvme's.

[djcristi]

thanks for sharing the results, but for a simple PCB card and a chipset it's way overpriced.

[djcristi]

i am more interested in the QM2 sata adapter, can anyone tell me how can i look in the kernel to find what driver/mod is loaded for it to find out by VENdor ID and product_id what chipset it uses? if you type lsmod i saw an qm2_i2c 2734 0 - Live 0x7ea38000 (O) , so it has an I2C bus for control or something.

[djcristi]

also tested in my TS-531X (latest firmware = 4.3.3) the following PCI-e SSD:
1. samsung sm951 , ahci , pci-e 3.0 4x : not detected at all
2. samsung pm950 , nvme , pci-e 3.0 4x : only detected as 0MB , could not show any info (smart data , specs , etc)
3. samsung 960 evo , nvme , pci-e 3.0 4x : detected, working, but only as 2x , TRIM not supported

so the support is quite limited...

[jds580s]

also tested in my TS-531X (latest firmware = 4.3.3) the following PCI-e SSD:
1. samsung sm951 , ahci , pci-e 3.0 4x : not detected at all
2. samsung pm950 , nvme , pci-e 3.0 4x : only detected as 0MB , could not show any info (smart data , specs , etc)
3. samsung 960 evo , nvme , pci-e 3.0 4x : detected, working, but only as 2x , TRIM not supported

so the support is quite limited...

What kind of card were you plugging each of those into?
If I'm not mistaken the sm951 is also an nvme drive along with the pm950 and 960 evo like you noted.
The PCIe slot on the TS-531X is only a Gen2 x2 slot. So you won't see PCIe 3.0 x4 speeds from anything connected to it.

Looking at QNAP's compatibility list for the TS-531X the only Samsung M.2 SSDs I see listed are the 850-EVO SATA M.2's in 120GB/250GB/500GB sizes.

[djcristi]

simple m.2 -> 4x slot adapter card. sm951 is ahci (HPV code) not nvme (VPV). thanks for clarification on 2x slot on my QNAP.

maybe all models are supported thru QM2-2P adapter card and not directly to pci-e like i tested.

[jds580s]

simple m.2 -> 4x slot adapter card. sm951 is ahci (HPV code) not nvme (VPV). thanks for clarification on 2x slot on my QNAP.

Thanks, I didn't realize they made the sm951 in both forms.
I suppose that's why it wasn't recognized in the PCIe adapter card. It would need some kind of chip to communicate between PCIe <-> SATA.

[djcristi]

it's not SATA! it's PCI-E AHCI

[jds580s]

it's not SATA! it's PCI-E AHCI

Ahh gotcha. I see I'm outside my element here then, I'm more used to AHCI being used over the SATA interface. I don't know enough about that particular drive to offer any good insights for your situation.

[tecrp7]

I just wanted to update everyone of my new found results and some digging here in the forums. I also read some post quickly in here to catch up a little so I don't know if what I am going to say has already been covered here.

My initials results were pathetic as I was not getting speeds in which I was expecting for NVMe cards. After some digging, I think I had "writeback" not enabled for cache mode under the VM settings. I also wasn't aware that the default HDD type is IDE when setting up a new VM. I also didn't know much about VirtIO. After a lot of reading I have figured out that we should be using VirtIO so the VM doesn't have to use an emulated HHD type and instead by pass some setting and take a more direct route to the hardware.

Now that I was able to get my VM to boot with VirtIO, I am now seeing some drastic changes in the NVMe speeds. I am running RAID 0 on me NVMs cards, but won't be able to actually get those speeds due to the QM2 card being a PCIe 2.0.

Here are my current results. Since having these settings, things have been moving along really quickly...

[Trexx]

Thanks for showing the test results.

Personally since I wouldn't get the full speed anyway from having NVMe in RAID-0, I personally would have gone with the extra security from having RAID-1 mirror to minimize data loss risk. I assume that you have a good backup process in place to mitigate the risk from running RAID-0 for your VM's.

[tecrp7]

Correct, I run a backup weekly onto my RAID 6. The Server is only running a streaming software and hosting a website that I use for troubleshooting, nothing major. I prefer RAID 0 at the moment for the extra space.

Also, I have never had any problems with Samsung SSD's and I have been using them for about 10 years (knock on wood )

I continue to look for a dual M-Key NVMe PCIe card on amazon. So far it is only 1 M-key and 1 B-key. I am also not going to spend a ton on the Squid card. I have a GPU coming in this week and I might run liquid cooling to my CPU as well.

[Benna80]

I've found on the Official QNAP youtube channel an interesting video (published on 08 December 2017) explaining everything must be know about QM2 card and the different possible usage.
I'm owner of a TVS-471, which shares the same motherboard with TVS-671 and TVS-871 as some of you have written here.

Well, as depicted at minute 50:00 you can see that the nas has 2 ports, the top one is GEN2 and the second one is a GEN3 port (they connect a LAN card to it).
Also, during this video, the guy says that is under development a QM2 card GEN3 compliant, so good news for everyone like me that wants to boost the nas performances but can wait until the new board comes out.

The only thing i'd like to understand is that if i enable R/W cache and Qtier 2.0 i don't know if this will help also in normal usage of the nas such as using Virtual machines or just during heavy file transfers.
I'd like to speedup my 2 VM and also speedup HDStation which MUST be installed on the system volume (and cannot be moved from there)

Here's the video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aokjZsX652E

[jds580s]

Also, during this video, the guy says that is under development a QM2 card GEN3 compliant, so good news for everyone like me that wants to boost the nas performances but can wait until the new board comes out.

That is great news, I had not watched that video before. It's good to hear that they are working on the Gen 3 version. I have been somewhat critical about the original QM2 cards because performance can really suffer if you have full duplex 10GbE and two NVMe SSDs on it. Those can far exceed the 20 gigabit/s bandwidth the Gen2 x4 interface is able to provide.

Here is a link to the time in the video where they discuss it. https://youtu.be/aokjZsX652E?t=1971

The only thing i'd like to understand is that if i enable R/W cache and Qtier 2.0 i don't know if this will help also in normal usage of the nas such as using Virtual machines or just during heavy file transfers.
I'd like to speedup my 2 VM and also speedup HDStation which MUST be installed on the system volume (and cannot be moved from there)

Yes both Qtier and R/W cache should speed both virtual machine Read/Write and IO performance as well as HDStation as long as both of those are setup on the same array and you configure Qtier and cache for that array.

I have both Qtier and R/W cache (actually I just disable R/W cache, but had previously been running with it for quite a while).
It does make a difference, but I am leaning more towards utilizing Qtier 2 without cache going forward. In the Qtier 2.0 video on the qnap youtube page they suggest that the new realtime features in Qtier 2 more-or-less provide the same functionality as the old cache.
The only down side with it's release is they would no longer allow you to configure Qtier with NVMe drives if they were in 3rd party (non QM2) cards, which mine were. I suppose I'll just have to wait until the new QM2 Gen3 cards get released and give that a try so my fastest tier can be NVMe based.

Thanks!

[Trexx]

See this post:

viewtopic.php?f=12&t=139978&hilit=qm2&start=15#p663489