From Raid 5 to 1

[raider69]

Dear community members,

I run a ts-453 pro with qts 4.3.3.0238. Bays 1 through 3 contain 3TB WD Reds in Raid5 config, i.e. 6TB net capacity. Bay 4 is empty. The raid group is in one big storage pool that, in turn, contains one big volume. Pretty simple setup so far.
Now I would like to exchange the Raid 5 with a Raid 1 made of 10TB disks in order to gain an additional available slot, some performance and more space. After browsing the forum, Qnap documentation and the rest of the web I am kindly asking you for some advivce: What is the easiest way to get there? Online Raid level migration from 5 to 1 is not supported; my initial hope was to leverage the available slot to build a new, single disk storage pool, somehow migrate the data volume to it, remove the old 3tb disks, insert the second 10TB one and build the Raid1. However there seems to be no way to migrate the (system) volume without the need to reinstall and reconfigure everything (snapshots, schedules, apps.......) which I wanted to avoid. Or is there?
Plan B might be to backup system config, take out the old disks, insert the new ones, and restore the config. Then get the data back from a backup medium. Will that work with the new disk setup and the old config file? I doubt that, but any experience you can share is welcome.
Last resort option would obviously be to rebuild and configure everything from scratch, but I was hoping for a smarter way... Any hints?
Thanks already for your help.

Cheers,
S

[Trexx]

You will actually LOSE performance in some respects by going from a 3 drive RAID-5 to a 2-Drive Raid-1. You might see a slight improvement in write throughput, but you will likely drop read throughput as well as overall IOPS capability due to going from 3 spindles to 2.

You could actually add your 10TB drive to your existing raid-5 group (would only get 3TB of space to start with) and then once you upgraded your other drives, you would have ~30TB Raid-5 space.

Only option to do this would be backup everything externally and start over. While you could do a single slot storage pool, it will be datavol2, and not all software/functions will support migration. There is also boot/system related information on your 1st storage pool that you can't "copy" to storage pool 2.

[dolbyman]

You will actually LOSE performance in some respects by going from a 3 drive RAID-5 to a 2-Drive Raid-10.

2 drive Raid1 you mean :p

[raider69]

Thanks a lot for your quick replies. Paul, you are correct about read performance; I have not been precise. My main use case where performance counts is a write intensive one - uploading tons of raw photos after photo sessions. I haven't been able to fully use gigabit speed for some reason. Other arguments for me to go to raid 1 were the possibility to get more space buying only two disks, along with the prospect to go for a raid10 long-term for top notch performance. Remarks & opinions welcome.
As to the migration path - this is definitely not the answer I was hoping for, but at least I know now for certain... Thanks again. Will most likely wait until I run out of space, hoping for new features from qnap by then. The demand to migrate the sysvol to a different storage pool does not sound too exotic, or does it?

[dolbyman]

unless it is tons of little files..your nas should saturate a 1GbE connection with any disk config..no matter if singe disks or any raid flavour

[Trexx]

Just an FYI, Qnap doesn’t support a raid migration path from raid-1 to Raid-10. Its only raid-1 to 5/6.


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[raider69]

Wow that last one is an eye opener Thanks. I thought they supported 1->10... Bummer. So this would mean another re-install unless they implement my freshly-sent feature request ticket for migrating volumes to different storage pools... Or migrate data between different RAID groups within one storage pool.
Will triplecheck if it is really my NAS that is the bottleneck, but as of now I do not get the gig link congested. I am doing many snapshots on the volume atm which leads to 5-30% performance loss according to Qnap. Let's see.

[Trexx]

Need more information about your config to help determine where bottleneck.

Where are you uploading from? How is your networking setup, etc? Other thing to check is do you have QSirch installed/enabled? Do you have media library enabled? These are all background indexing processes than can add overhead and reduce performance.

You will NOT get 1GbE speed when copying a bunch of smaller files, only when doing large file transfers. And yes there is a trade-off regarding snapshots vs. performance. One new option is the use of a snapshot "folder". Basically you are creating a new volume that is mapped to a shared folder. Faster restores than the whole volume and potentially less overhead.

Now if 90% of all your storage is going to the "photo's" folder, then you really wouldn't save much in vs. full drive snapshot.

[raider69]

Thanks again Paul, and sorry for the late reply; been offline for some time. As to your questions -
Network is very basic, one unmanaged Gig switch, uploading from a laptop with Gig interface. No Qsirch, no media library, afaik nothing else that might run as a background task except for snapshots, disk checks, raid scrubbing now and then. I guess the key to my system's performance is the nature of the files (4-6MB JPGs plus ca 35MB large raw photos 50/50) plus the well-known mediocre network efficiency of SMB itself... But performance has not been my main concern anyway, don't mind.
Baseline is that there is as of now no way to get the system moved to a different volume nor to migrate RAID levels live from 5 to 1(0). Let's wait and see if QNAP implements one of both eventually...

Cheers,
S

[Trexx]

Some basic things you can do.

Make sure you have a UPS behind your NAS before doing these:

Make Sure you are set to SMB 3.0 & Asynch I/O under Microsoft Networking > Advanced

Enable "Caching Storage" (will use system ram) - Storage Manager > Storage Space > Select Volume > Manage > Action > Caching.


Other option you could do... Take your photo shoot files for the day, and then zip them up into 1 large file. Transfer the large file to your QNAP and then uncompress them on the QNAP.

[Trexx]

Baseline is that there is as of now no way to get the system moved to a different volume nor to migrate RAID levels live from 5 to 1(0). Let's wait and see if QNAP implements one of both eventually...
S

Don't think you will ever see that happen as you amount of changes and juggles at the block level is TOO significant probably to do on existing drives.

[testflight]

Network is very basic, one unmanaged Gig switch, uploading from a laptop with Gig interface. No Qsirch, no media library, afaik nothing else that might run as a background task except for snapshots, disk checks, raid scrubbing now and then. I guess the key to my system's performance is the nature of the files (4-6MB JPGs plus ca 35MB large raw photos 50/50) plus the well-known mediocre network efficiency of SMB itself... But performance has not been my main concern anyway, don't mind.

Performance can vary based on how you copy the files. JPGs don't compress much if at all, so the only variable is file verification which you wouldn't want to turn off, but that adds overhead, so you'd never get Gigabit throughput. Using robocopy (Windoze), is a lot faster that drag and drop though and will complete the job without recopying files if something goes wrong.