Attempting to use QNap TS-1886XU

[pbrunnen]

Hello all,
I've got a QNap TS-1886XU that I'm stuck with and I wanted to try and load TrueNAS on it. I can get it to boot the installer, but it doesn't see any of the disk drives to install on. I'm a gnu/linux guy and not too familiar with BSD, so none of the normal commands that I would use work. Any suggestions?

Thanks! -Peter.

 

[jgreco]

It isn't clear what commands you think you would use to make drives appear. Mmm.

It is quite possible that whatever controller or backplane is being used by the system is not compatible or supported by FreeNAS. If you can get a readout of what the system manifest is from the QNAP firmware, that might be helpful. You might also be able to try TrueNAS SCALE, which is based on Linux, which may give a different result.

It looks like a nice-ish bit of gear, but be aware that these things are often customized in ways that generic software like FreeNAS/TrueNAS won't fully support.

 

[pbrunnen]

Hi jgreco,
Thanks for the reply... While I was awaiting my post to be approved, I came across and was reading on here about Scale... I'm just in the process of trying that out now. At least on linux I can use lspci and I know how to look for/load kernel modules. On FreeBSD everything I tried was either command not found or wrong syntax.

Yea, I realize that it is specialized... And it should be nice for the price. I bought it because they touted SED support in their marketing material. Come to find out they only support SED on consumer SSD drives and not enterprise class drives, so I was rather upset... QNap support diddled around on the topic for so long before coming out with "enterprise drives are not supported", but QNap won't take it back. So I'm stuck with this hardware and I can't use it otherwise. I'd been looking at TrueNAS (FreeNAS) for a while, so this was an opportunity. I'm trying to do what I can, else I got to put it up on eBay or something.

Thanks!

 

[pbrunnen]

Ok, so looks like the storage is via a Marvell Technology 88SE1475. Drivers from Marvell are a dead-end, but luckily it looks like QNap sells a QXP-1600eS card with the same chip and drivers are available on the Qnap download page. Soo, looks like I'm building a kernel module today.

 

[jgreco]

Yea, I realize that it is specialized... And it should be nice for the price. I bought it because they touted SED support in their marketing material. Come to find out they only support SED on consumer SSD drives and not enterprise class drives, so I was rather upset... QNap support diddled around on the topic for so long before coming out with "enterprise drives are not supported", but QNap won't take it back.

Sorry that's happened to you.

I'm not entirely up to date with the SED state of affairs on modern SSD's. It's also not clear if you wanted to use SED with enterprise HARD drives or SSD's, but I wanted to offer this additional bit:

If you were hoping to use this NAS for an SSD based array, and are put off by consumer SSD's, please take a moment and analyze your situation.

Some of us have been using consumer grade SSD's for relatively heavy workloads for many years. It is true that they won't take a write pounding, but with 2TB and 4TB SSD's being relatively inexpensive these days, it is worth considering whether you actually need "enterprise" class SSD's. I've talked often over the years about the Intel 535 480GB experiment we embarked on here in 2015, which sport a fantastic 40GB/day (73TBW) endurance. Regardless, we used them in RAID1 for hypervisor datastores, running somewhat intensive workloads like USENET, and basically ran them until most of them died, many of which exceeded their workload ratings by a fair bit. For many workloads I've seen, people waste money on enterprise drives. It's amusing because we sometimes buy used enterprise SSD's on eBay and find them with 98% lifetime left.

 

[pbrunnen]

Hi jgreco,
Appreciate it... And I should say, the support team in CA really did try to help. The team out of Taiwan were just rude though.

That is actually good info and something to consider... So far I've been still very resistant to SSDs in anything but the workstation where I don't care about failure. Maybe I'm just old-school, but I feel more confident with spinning disk when it comes to failures.

Either way, in this case they are spinning drives that I'm using. We've got a bunch of older stock on several models, so I'm trying to use them rather than the lot go to waste.

 

[kherr]

There was another similar thread. To boot off the USB drive you have to go into the BIOS and set it. If your Qnap doesn't support a monitor ....... I don't know. I'm going to try it with my 673 one of these days since Qnap doesn't support rsync Modules. Going from Qnap > TrueNas is simple, but the other way around gets involved ....

 

[pbrunnen]

There was another similar thread. To boot off the USB drive you have to go into the BIOS and set it. If your Qnap doesn't support a monitor ....... I don't know. I'm going to try it with my 673 one of these days since Qnap doesn't support rsync Modules. Going from Qnap > TrueNas is simple, but the other way around gets involved ....

Hi Kherr,
Yes, I've made the change in the BIOS already and I've gotten the QNap to boot from USB to run the installer. The TS-1886XU doesn't have a display port, but a simple 1x PCIe video card into one of the expansion bays solves that issue. I'm able to install to an external USB encosure with a drive for now just to get up and running. The big hurdle right now is that the Marvell storage controller used for all the disks is neither in the mainline BSD or Linux kernels. So I'm using Scale at the moment and trying to build the driver... For a more production setup, I'll use a PCIe disk device, but first I have to make sure I can get access to the build the kernel module else it isn't worth sinking any more money into this pit.

P.S. Delete key is the trick for getting into the BIOS and then you can turn off Quiet mode so the AMI BIOS screen appears instead of just the QNap boot logo.

 

[pbrunnen]

Hello all,
Just an update here as I've had some discussion in the Scale forums, but I wanted to put the detail here for completeness...

I've build the mv14xx kernel module for the TrueNAS kernel, but it isn't stable and causes kernel panics. I'm not a kernel developer, so I'm not going to be able to debug this any further unfortunately... I've created a Jira suggestion (NAS-110414) requesting support for the Marvell chipset, but we'll see if that goes anywhere.

Unfortunately I think at this point I'll have to abandon this endeavor and find other hardware.

Thanks everyone for your input.