TS-439 Pro - no SMART, no Volumes, single drives, how to fix this mess?

[doman18]

In company i work we have TS-439 Pro running for couple years. Firmware version is 3.2.1 build 1231T. When lately i got acess to it i found the situation is really SCARY ...
- all data is on single drives - some "genious" erased RAID created at very beginning
- SMART screen redirects user to login screen - so there is no info about HDDs health and dont know if any alerts or warning notifications about HDD health will work in such situation
- there no info about disk volumes



Data on SDA3,SDB3,SDC3 disks are not very important - it would be shame to loose them but noone will cry. But SDD3 data is critical.

1. What is the best way to make mirror RAID with SDD3 drive?
As far as i know migrating disk to RAID doesnt make data lost on this disk. My idea is to move data from SDB3 (/share/HDB_DATA -> ~50GB) shown on the screen above to SDC3 (163GB) and migrate SDD3 to SDD3+SDB3 mirror RAID. What is the best way to move data from SDB3 to SDC3? Is copying to some folder and changing mountpoint in /etc/fstab to symlink to this folder is enough or is there better way?

2. How to fix SMART screen?
I already tried this solution
https://helpdesk.qnap.com/index.php?/Kn ... nformation.

Edited xml file but still SMART screen doesnt work. I also dont have any disk usage on Resource Monitor screen. All i get are disk Temperatures on Information screen.




3. How to see disk volumes?
I dont see neither disk volumes. Problem fixed with solution mentioned above. I just had to add space betwieen tags. But SMART still doesnt work.

https://pl.imgbb.com/

4.How Remote Replication feature works?
I wanted to buy some used workstation with ECC memory, many disk slots but in ATX form (motherboard and power supply), 4xWD Red 4TB disks and 1 SSD, install some OS (FreeNAS?) which can handle ZFS filesystem and make RAID10 with it. And last but not least, use tools like RSYNC or SYNCTHING to perodically backup data from Qnap.
But ive seen this Remote Replication feature in Qnap. Is it something like RSYNC? Do i need another Qnap device for it and should it be exaclty the same as original? Or is it just data copying and can use machine i mentioned above?

5. Are there any Qnap devices with ZFS in acceptable prices?

Sorry for any language mistakes - im from Poland.

[dolbyman]

backup the data and start from scratch .. updating qts to the latest version .. and create a raid5 ...that should fix most issues

not sure of the 439 can do storage pools ...or only legacy..but zfs is only available on large enterprise models so far

[P3R]

not sure of the 439 can do storage pools ...or only legacy..

Old cat 1 model so no storage pools and now EoL so QTS 4.2 is the latest and last release.

The 3 WD Green 1 TB disks aren't recommended for NAS use at all.

[dolbyman]

The 3 WD Green 1 TB disks aren't recommended for NAS use at all.

That whole NAS is a treasure trove of bad ideas

[doman18]

backup the data and start from scratch

Its simplest approach and i would gladly do it if i could. But ...
- i dont have any external disk to do it and even if i had ...
- i dont have physical access - i log in to it trough VPN tunnel which is very slow and even if i had such access
- i would had to save whole user, groups and their access to specific folders which would require to do all this operation i day-off when nobody is using Qnap

Creating a mirrored volume is the fastest thing i can do right now, and i want to do it as fast as possible because as you see im dealing here with a bomb. This setup can break in any moment and consequences will be bad for my company.

So please, can you refer to questions i asked in the first topic? Especially im interested about question 4 - do i need exaclty the same machine, and what kind of data is Replicated. Because if it doesnt require 1 to 1 similarity, and not only pure data are replicated but also users, groups and their rights then i would not even think about some fancy ZFS machine, but i would just
1. buy another Qnap NAS with some WD Reds,
2. make RAID 5 or 6 there
3. Go to the headquarters with it and replicate all, and put this as main nas
4. Reset all this messed Qnap, update it, setup it the right way and leave it as backup for the new machine.

[dolbyman]

you have vital data on a device with WD green drives, no redundancy and no backups ? ... This needs more than a small fix

Getting a new NAS an replicate the data from the old to the new NAS sounds like a good idea, check the manual on how to export users and groups

[P3R]

Creating a mirrored volume is the fastest thing i can do right now, and i want to do it as fast as possible because as you see im dealing here with a bomb.

Yes it's a bomb but migrating to RAID 1 on (most likely very old) WD Greens, which are well known to often cause problems, is not what I would consider a safe disarming of it. That may as well be the thing that make it go off. Don't touch what's (at least for the moment) working is a better approach here I would say.

I would put all effort on getting a backup system online as quickly as possible and then copy as much as possible off this since long neglected system/bomb.

So please, can you refer to questions i asked in the first topic? Especially im interested about question 4 - do i need exaclty the same machine...

As far as I know rsync have been available since before the the TS-439, so should be in 3.2.1 firmware also. Another Qnap will probably simplify things significantly but then again, nothing can be promised with an ancient firmware connecting to an up to date system. The combination is unlikely to have been subject to any testing.

...and what kind of data is Replicated.

Remote Replication will deal with data in the shared folders only.

Because if it doesnt require 1 to 1 similarity, and not only pure data are replicated but also users, groups and their rights then i would not even think about some fancy ZFS machine, but i would just
1. buy another Qnap NAS with some WD Reds...

At least users and groups should be in the file produced by the configuration backup feature but I have no idea if a 3.2.1 configuration file will be possible to restore on an up to date Qnap? In theory it should be possible, at least if starting out with single disks in the new Qnap ,that could later be migrated into a proper RAID configuration. At one time the disk configuration was added to the configuration backup file, so was also affected (this may or may not have changed?). If it doesn't work, Qnap support could probably help out but I wouldn't bet my head on success as this may have gone too far.

[doman18]

I just wrote to Qnap Support.

One more question. Ive read here that there is no possible to move configuration (im not talking about data) to new devices
viewtopic.php?t=103464

6. Are there any advantages of moving data to new Qnap machine over moving them to completely different NAS?

[P3R]

Ive read here that there is no possible to move configuration (im not talking about data) to new devices
viewtopic.php?t=103464

Well it was to get around that limitation that I recommended using a single disk configuration when restoring the old NAS system configuration. Once you have the system configuration transferred, you could migrate the new NAS into RAID 5 or RAID 6 (depending on how critical the system is). Obviously I haven't tried that with your configuration but in theory, this should work I beleive.

6. Are there any advantages of moving data to new Qnap machine over moving them to completely different NAS?

Well if the above configuration transfer works despite the huge difference in QTS versions, that's a huge advantage as I see it. The other being that you have lifetime free official support from Qnap. With a home built NAS and a community edition ZFS NAS software you have only the best effort assistance from a forum, what we've tried our best to give you here now.

As you're speaking of a ZFS NAS, it's also important to know that while ZFS is appealing in some areas it lacks the migration features that Qnap users take for granted.

Regardless of file system used on the NAS, that's not what protects the data. It's always backups on other systems that's really protecting your data.

[doman18]

Well as i mentioned before i was considering the fact that there is no way to move configuration from one Qnap to another. If there is, profits are very clear, and there is no discussion about that. But if not and Replication is nothing more than synchronising stored files then benfits are not so significant. For the price of cheapest 4 bay Qnap NAS - TS-431 i can have Xeon E5620, 24GB RAM ECC, Delta 475W ATX power supply with 80 bronze and all this in Ravcore Goliath chasis with 7 bays for disks by default and 5 more if i decide to use something like IcyBox IB-555SSK. This theoreticly would allow to manage easily 24TB of data in ZFS system (following ZFS recomendations 1TB = 1GB ram). Even if we would use RAID 10 as im planning then max usefull space we can have is 12TB. Considering that after about 5 years company gathered about 1,6 TB of data (which only 0,5 is very precious) 12TB is more than enough. But remember, ZFS recomendation is only recomendation, we can go further with data space as long as we wont feel significant slowing.

As you're speaking of a ZFS NAS, it's also important to know that while ZFS is appealing in some areas it lacks the migration features that Qnap users take for granted.

All data needed for ZFS migration is written in disks. And as far as ive seen migrating whole pool to another machine is extremely easy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKdGg1_lf1Q
And if we speaking about expanding, im rather thinking about RAID10 over RAIDZ2, especially when you have so many bays to use. So there will be no need for doing migration for quite a time. Only when SMARTs will show that disks are aged then it would be a good reason to move on. But expansion which is more often a case will not be such reason.

But again, if Replication is more than simple sync and you can move your configs from one Qnap to another easily then all other factors are insignificant.

Regardless of file system used on the NAS, that's not what protects the data. It's always backups on other systems that's really protecting your data.

Yes, im aware of that. That is why we wont throw out TS-439 but it will be updated, reconfigured and used for backup purposes.

[P3R]

But if not and Replication is nothing more than synchronising stored files then benfits are not so significant.

Again, Remote Replication is only of data. There is no replication of the configurations between different Qnap NASes. There's a manual backup/restore feature of the basic system configuration that normally can be used to pre-seed a new system (with the considerations already mentioned) but after that, it's intended only for backup/restore of the system configuration on that same individual NAS.

For the price of cheapest 4 bay Qnap NAS - TS-431 i can have Xeon E5620, 24GB RAM ECC, Delta 475W ATX power supply with 80 bronze and all this in Ravcore Goliath chasis with 7 bays for disks...

Then either Qnap are extremely expensive in Poland or all other IT-equipment is extremely cheap. In my market a TS-431 (but I would recommend a better Qnap for business use) cost less than the Xeon CPU alone...

But I don't want to go into a sales discussion here because to me this is an apples-to-oranges-comparison. Yes you can pick hi-end hardware for a ZFS-system, build and support it yourself. On the other hand you can buy a very compact Qnap that's a complete data storage solution (with an impressive number of add-on apps) with free support and that use much less power. Neither is better, they're different and they usually target totally different customers.

We've shown you what in theory is a possible Qnap system configuration migration but given that the system you have now have been neglected and is on pre-historic firmware (and uses non-compatible disks) it may not be successful. I don't know but maybe Qnap support can assist better with details on that..?

All data needed for ZFS migration is written in disks. And as far as ive seen migrating whole pool to another machine is extremely easy.

Yes it is, when it works as intended. I've experienced when the destination system became confused about disk order and it was painful to sort out (but thanks to the dual disk redundancy of raidz2 it was finally possible avoiding data loss). In general moving ZFS-disks from system to system works. A difference worth noting though is that a Qnap System Migration moves everything, including the complete configuration to the new system while at least in the ZFS implementation that I've used, it's only been the plain disks with data.

But what I really meant that is that no RAID migration is possible with ZFS. You can't go from a single disk to mirrored (RAID 1) to radz1 (RAID 5) to raidz2 (RAID 6) with data retained as you can do with Qnap. I'm aware that complete migration path probably isn't interesting for you but it may be for others coming to this thread in the future.

Also adding disks to a pool later in ZFS usually gives you a non-optimized configuration. Of course you can compensate for these ZFS limitations by overinvesting in disks from the start but you'd not only pay for that with much higher disk cost initially but also with a lot of wasted power usage and increased complexity over the whole life time.

[doman18]

http://allegro.pl/hp-z400-w3520-2-67-12 ... 36971.html
This store estimated this machine with 24GB RAM and Xeon E5620 at cost arround 1300 PLN. Offcourse it is used machine, from some office or company where they switched it to something new. We already have two of those in company and they workin great. Notice that i forgot to mention about SSD (new). Here you have chasis
http://allegro.pl/duza-obudowa-ravcore- ... 29723.html

Both will cost arround 1600zł. Now here you have cheapest Qnap.
http://allegro.pl/serwer-plikow-nas-dys ... 72197.html

Well yeah, its similar to price Z400 itself, without chasis but even so, price rate is self-explanatory.


Ok i spoke with support an guy suggested to:
1. buy new machine,
2. set up RAID and recreate users and groups as in old machine - do not copy config.
3. rsync the files to new machine(without UIDs) so user rights will be recognised by name, not by UIDs)
4. Set new one as main
5. Update and reconfigure old
6. Set schedule for Replications from new machine
7. Use cron, qcli and rsync to backup all users and groups table along with replicated data.

[doman18]

One more thing. What if i set new machine (with some RAID) as backup, set schedule for rsync/qsynch but wont do anything else? I mean i leave old NAS as it is - as main NAS, with sigle drives, no update. What happens when some disk fails in old machine? Because as far as understand it just wont sync lost data, so it will not overwrite its copies on backup NAS. Doesnt it mean that if you have backup machin you dont gain anything from RAID on main machine? Or am i missing something?

[dolbyman]

if synced shares are missing on the source machine (due to dead drive),it will throw an error and not delete them on the backup target

[P3R]

if synced shares are missing on the source machine (due to dead drive),it will throw an error and not delete them on the backup target

That's assuming:

1. Disks dies cleanly, which is rarely the case. Often they're behaving flaky and unpredictable when approaching death...
2. There are no bugs in the system that are triggered by the abnormal state of the hardware.