QNAP NAS Community Forum

I just received a ts-673A and 2 WDS100T2B0B (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B073SB2MXT) SSD drives but neither of these drives shows up. I've tried reseating the drives to ensure they are properly installed. I've found mention that these drives work in this system so I'm not sure if there is a HW issue with my new system or something else. Find it hard to believe that the drives would be bad but possibly a compatibility issue?

Any help/guidance/recommendations for m.2 drives that have worked well would be greatly appreciated.

common mistake, you put M2 SATA into M2 NVMe slots

will not work

always consult the compatibility guide for recommendations

where did you see that?

only compatible M2 models are NVMe!

https://www.qnap.com/en/compatibility/? ... tegory=ssd

PaulAtreidis wrote: ↑Thu Jun 23, 2022 12:05 pm Only this one seems to be compatible:
WDS100T1B0A Client BLUE SATA 6Gb/s (SATA III) X41000WD 1 TB

That's a 2.5" SSD. You have to select M.2 SSD, and from WD I see only Black and Red (the NVMe version ofc) are listed.

By the way, I'm using Samsung 970 Evo Plus. It's on the compatibility list, it's not very expensive, it has a decent TBW (600TBW for the 1GB), and, with a heatsink, it doesn't get too warm.
IMO the TBW is essential here, as the SSD will be limited by the M.2 slot to a theoretical max of 1GB/s.

Thanks for the replies. I ordered 2 Seagate Ironwolf 500GB NVMe drives last night. Can't wait for them to show up. Side question, will these be better served as SSD cache or for OS location? One for each?

If you're using QuTS Hero, it's best if you have the system pool (the first one created) on SSDs, 2x on RAID1.
Be aware that with QuTS Hero (actually, with ZFS) you cannot migrate RAID levels nor add drives to RAID5/6/TP. This would affect how you create HDD pools i.e. you would create a pool with exactly how many drives you want it to have (rather than start with fewer and expand it later).

Are you running QTS or QuTS on it? .. For QuTS System install on SSD is pretty much mandatory.

Either way SSD cache is not really great for most usage cases anyways

I was/am planning on running QuTS. I did not know that I couldn't migrate my existing RAID. I have 6x6TB drives, 4 in my current NAS RAID5, and 2 that I bought to add into. Since I'm not able to migrate over I think I'll keep one drive in its own pool, and set up a remote mount to the previous NAS in order to copy over family photos, etc. to that stand-alone drive. So pool one would be the 2 NVMe drives running QuTS, and pool two would be a stand-alone drive with backed-up content from the previous box, then 5 drives into RAID 5.

The main purpose of this NAS is to use as a Plex server. Along with the previously mentioned 6x6TB drives and the 2x500GB NVMe drives, I'm putting in 32GB mem and a ASUS GeForce GTX 1050 Ti 4GB to handle transcoding. Any advice from my very learned friends on setup?

Thanks again

No need to setup a single drive

As QuTS cannot expand storage, setup your NAS up with all drives (the system SSDs) and the data HDDs) and copy over the files from your old NAS (or from the backup that you hopefully always have .. a RAID is not a backup) and

I had set up a 7TB external drive years ago to back up just these files for just such an instance. I forgot all about it. It last ran 3 months ago. It's great chatting with you folks. Educational and reminiscent.

Before proceeding, please make sure everything's OK with the backup, and I would keep the important stuff in (at least) two location at all times (which means a secondary backup, be it another HDD or cloud).

Wise advice. I had already started validating my content and was looking at possibly getting a TL-D800C expansion to use as a primary backup and my current external drive as a secondary for all my really important stuff. Might wait a bit for that.

Be aware that the TL units require the host device for the RAID, so if the NAS dies, the TL unit will just have single disks on it that would need mounting again to be accessible (bad as backup)

If having 8 HDD bays is not mandatory, how about using an inexpensive 4 bays NAS instead? These aren't much more expensive than a TR-004.

I plan to do that, as I still have my old TS-431p around; just need the HDDs to put in (don't worry, I have backups).