If you are thinking about putting TrueNAS on your QNAP - it is just wow on mine!

[tre4B]

I thought I would put this on here as others like me may have been concerned about QNAP OS breaches and wondered if there is something better and or safer out there than QTS to run on the hardware.

I looked into this for quite a while and when I struggled initially getting it to boot nearly stopped trying. I am so glad that I did get TrueNAS going, it is like I have a whole new NAS. Compared to QTS my NAS is so fast, operations are completing so much quicker and things that in the past had taken days to copy to and from the QNAP are completing well within one day. This is all on exactly the same hardware. On my QNAP TrueNAS feels so responsive.

Other issues have gone too. I never knew if I would be able to access the QNAP from windows. Some days it would show up in Networks others it would not, or would appear after a long time. It always opened each file and directory so slowly too, now they open almost as fast as the local hard drives.

I'm only doing really basic stuff and only for one small household, so barely scratching the capabilities of TrueNAS, yet that is all I needed on the QNAP ever and had to deal with a lot of stuff I did not want slowing the box down. Granted TrueNAS may not work for your particular QNAP model, but if you are thinking of trying and have a model strong enough to try it, then it is really worth a go.

now all I need to do is manage to get iSCSI to start working

 

[leigou]

Which QNAP model did you install TrueNas (Scale or Core?) on? Is your fan controller working or did you manually set at 100%?

 

[tre4B]

I'm using a TS543be (more details in signature). I've not specifically checked the fan operation, however I have kept an eye on the temps which seem about the same as when it was operating on QTS. Have you tried and had issues with this? I cannot say I have specifically checked it as it runs in a network cabinet in my understairs cupboard and that does tend to make things in there run hot (which is why I tend to keep an eye on temps). If there are any tests you would like me to run I am happy to do so, I may find out more about this. In truth TrueNAS is working so much better than QTS I would probably look for a way round anyway.

 

[leigou]

The HHDs seldom get that hot. However, the x2 M.2 nvme 1TB SSDs RAID1 - QTS 'system' plus, VMs and Containers - can get hot so fans ramp up automatically. Thanks for offer and suggestion, yes I'll monitor the temps more closely this week and try installing TrueNAS weekend coming. Is there way to set a fixed speed (e.g. 50%) for fans in TureNAS (other than 100%)?

 

[Sirfucksworth]

I decided to add a NAS to my homelab and sunset my old desktop that played that role. So I picked up a QNAP TVS-871U-RP 8x for a couple hundred bucks on eBay. Received the unit to find that the usb dom module was missing and I could not figure out how to get QTS onto the system. I decided to try out truenas core and it was surprisingly easy to setup and run jails. I however was curious about switching to scale and that's really where my rabbit hole started. I had my OS and App pools running on the m.2 SSD's I put into it and I could never get Kubernetes to work. It would always say the service was not running and apps would hang at 0%. I tried clean installs, setting and unsetting the pools, restarts, everything I could find online and nothing worked. Then I find a lonely post about someone with a mechanical drive that was having the same issues and switched to a SSD. So I plopped a nvme pcie into the unit and assigned that as the app pool and boom Kubernetes started working. So I image the speed of those m.2 drives or the slots are not fast enough for Kubernetes liking. Everything is currently running smooth. I will be swapping out the i5 for a i7 I got off eBay to add 4 more threads to the unit. My only gripe about this setup is the HDD lights on the hot swap bays do not seem to work with Truenas. I can live without that but it would be nice to get em working. Outside of that the fans can get loud but not loud enough to be heard on mic or my wife complaining about it. If anyone has any insight into getting the lights to work let me know. Other than that, I think it was a blessing that I couldn't get QTS to work and that sent me to Truenas.

 

[tre4B]

One thing I did not note above is that my QNAP has 16GB ram in it. Technically that is not supported by QNAP, but I read of others that had tried and it all worked, so I did the same to mine. That may give it an advantage over a standard 8GB one. In truth, I had forgotten about it until I saw your post.

 

[bklyngaucho]

I thought I would put this on here as others like me may have been concerned about QNAP OS breaches and wondered if there is something better and or safer out there than QTS to run on the hardware.

I looked into this for quite a while and when I struggled initially getting it to boot nearly stopped trying. I am so glad that I did get TrueNAS going, it is like I have a whole new NAS. Compared to QTS my NAS is so fast, operations are completing so much quicker and things that in the past had taken days to copy to and from the QNAP are completing well within one day. This is all on exactly the same hardware. On my QNAP TrueNAS feels so responsive.

Other issues have gone too. I never knew if I would be able to access the QNAP from windows. Some days it would show up in Networks others it would not, or would appear after a long time. It always opened each file and directory so slowly too, now they open almost as fast as the local hard drives.

I'm only doing really basic stuff and only for one small household, so barely scratching the capabilities of TrueNAS, yet that is all I needed on the QNAP ever and had to deal with a lot of stuff I did not want slowing the box down. Granted TrueNAS may not work for your particular QNAP model, but if you are thinking of trying and have a model strong enough to try it, then it is really worth a go.

now all I need to do is manage to get iSCSI to start working

Did you follow a particular guide to get this installed? If so, can you share?

 

[tre4B]

Did you follow a particular guide to get this installed? If so, can you share?

I didn't I am afraid, I worked it out as I went along.

My biggest challenge was that the QNAP refused to boot from the NVME disks I added via its internal PCI bus. This meant in the end I used a pair of USB3 connected NVME drives for the booting of the machine. USB devices boot happily, and I reasoned if they were NVME drives and not USB sticks this should be reliable, and it has proven to be. I even shutdown the machine every night and restart it every morning as otherwise the noise keeps my other half awake.

In truth because of the use of USB drives this was all non-destructive as you can install TrueNas to those and run it up without affecting any other disks in the machine. If it seems to work okay from there you can then choose to make use of the other drives within the box. This worked well for me as I had installed the internal NVME drives in the QNAP so I could simply use them as data stores in TrueNAS without affecting the main spinning disk array.

 

[bklyngaucho]

Thank you, sounds like a risk free way to try it out.