Failure to create SED Storage pool on 4 x SSD

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Julian
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Joined: Mon May 10, 2010 5:37 am

Failure to create SED Storage pool on 4 x SSD

Post by Julian »

I'm fully aware that there are other threads on this but I wanted to share my experience with my configuration, and also call out QNAP on its in my opinion quite poor support.

My configuration is a QNAP TBS-464 with 4 x 2TB Samsung 970 EVO Plus installed, all purchased new 22 days ago. This NAS was chosen for portability so that I could carry it in hand luggage and in the unlikely (I'm careful) event that I had my bag stollen while travelling it is essential that I am able to encrypt the data; for performance reasons I prefer to use the SED capabilities of the drives rather than have QTS do it in the higher level software.

As others have found attempting to create a SED storage space on SSDs fails with the unhelpful error message "An unknown error occurred". This error was consistent, I even tried a factory reset after my first attempts and after ungrading the firmware to build 1986 but still got the error every time I attempted to create a SED storage pool using all 4 SSDs in a RAID6 configuration. During my numerous attempts to get it working I tried various options for SSD over-provisioning and guaranteed snapshot space including the default values and none-at-all. Every single attempt gave the same error so I am forced to conclude that this functionality simply does not work at least on my configuration. Particularly disappointing since the release notes for the latest full (non beta) build 1986 includes "Users could not create a self-encrypting drive (SED) storage pool on SSDs" as a fixed issue.

After many hours of messing around with the options, factory reset etc I filed a support ticket that same day. I got the response back that it wasn't a problem that the support guy had encountered and that he would escalate it to R&D. That was almost 3 weeks ago now so I followed up to ask if the ticket had been allocated to someone in R&D, whether they had been able to replicate the problem, and whether they had any timeline for a fix. The response I got back was that the ticket had been allocated but that they were unable to answer my other two questions. I can totally understand not wanting to answer the last question, as a software engineer I know that if it's a really difficult bug sometimes you simply have no idea how long it might take to find it especially if it's a race condition where pretty much all standard debugging tools and techniques will fail you but surely they could at least have said whether they had been able to reproduce the problem on their test system or not or whether my bug had got high enough in the queue for the assigned engineer to have tried to reproduce it yet?

I do see that there is now a public beta recently released (5.0.1.2034) that doesn't fix the issue (I just plugged in my NAS again and tried) and to add insult to injury the release notes make no mention of issues with creating SED storage spaces on SSDs in the known issues list.

I get the impression that QNAP couldn't care less about this issue and am getting very concerned about whether any real attempt is being made to fix it.

Are there any official routes for expressing dissatisfaction with the response to a support ticket? I would be at least somewhat reassured if they could tell me that whoever the ticket was assigned to had been able to reproduce the problem, or even give me an honest answer that the bug will be looked at but so far the particular engineer assigned to it hasn't had time yet, or worst case that they tried and failed to reproduce the error which I would hope might then prompt an investigation into what was peculiar about my factory-fresh setup using drives that are on the compatibility list even to the extent of the exact capacities that I am using.
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