QNAP TS-659 Pro II Review
by Ganesh T S on September 19, 2011 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- IT Computing
- NAS
- QNAP
One of the NAS aspects that does't get much attention in online reviews is data recovery. We have been trying to address that starting with our review of the LG NAS N2A2. In this section, we will first see how RAID rebuild works.
In order to test RAID recovery, we created a iSCSI LUN and filled it up with data so that the NAS became 96 % full. We removed the drive in the second bay, and the administration web interface immediately reports entry into the degraded mode. In the degraded mode, the read and write performance have negligible penalty, and the data access suffers no issues even with the rebuild going on in the background.
The removed hard drive was formatted to NTFS in Windows and reinserted into the drive bay. The rebuild went without any issues. However, repeating this with the drive in the first bay didn't go well. The following two screenshots from the system logs show the encountered issue.
This problem has also been reported on the QNAP forums here. The only way to get past this was to either insert a raw drive into the system or make sure all the partitions were completely removed from the drive to be reinserted (no NTFS or exFAT partitions). We rebuilt the RAID-5 volume three times under different conditions. The table below indicates the time taken for the rebuild process to complete with different replacement drives.
| RAID-5 Rebuild Durations | |
| 1 TB Samsung 7200rpm Drive, NAS 96% Full | 04:03:15 |
| 2 TB Seagate 5900rpm Drive, NAS Empty | 04:10:20 |
| 1 TB Samsung 7200rpm Drive, NAS Empty | 04:01:34 |
| . | |
It is evident that the rebuild takes around 4 hours irrespective of the drive being used for the rebuild.
The next aspect we tested was the one touch copy feature of the TS-659 Pro II. We used a OCZ Enyo USB 3.0 SSD filled with 100 GB of data (multiple copies of the 10.7 GB Blu-ray folder structure used in the robocopy tests) and used the one touch copy feature to copy it into the RAID-5 volume. The transfer was carried out at 87.28 MBps.The USB 3.0 feature is a nice addition to the unit, but it only makes sense in situations where you have data on SSDs to back up. We can't imagine too many people using HDDs with USB 3.0 (where eSATA is available for cheaper). We would also have liked a one-touch copy feature for one of the eSATA ports.
The table below records the power consumption of the unit under various conditions with the 6 x 1 TB drives attached. The PSU is not terribly efficient, consuming more than 1W even when the unit is fully powered off.
| TS-659 Pro II Power Consumption | |
| Powered off | 1.3 W |
| Idle (Sleep after no hard disk access for 30 min.) | 30.2 W |
| Powered on | 61.5 W |
| Powered on (Full load) | 72.3 W |
| . | |
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69 Comments
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meesterlars - Tuesday, September 20, 2011 - link
Sorry, Ganesh, I must have not seen that you had written the review.Yes, please do try and recreate the issues documented in the forum. Perhaps a little publicity from you guys would pressure QNAP into action.
IaninKL - Friday, May 25, 2012 - link
Hi Ganesh,I've just bought a TS-559Pro-II, so far just using it for a short-term project so have configured as JBOD and loaded about 6TB of data. 5*2TB Enterprise-grade drives.
I am wondering if the issue raised here was ever resolved?
The linked-page on the QNAP Forums has been taken down and there is no follow-up info on this thread either.
Cheers - keep up the great work!
QNAPSimon - Friday, September 23, 2011 - link
Thanks for bring this to our attention. We at QNAP are aware of the problem and have allocated dedicated resources to look into this. I will follow up on this and provide updates on our forum. If you have related concerns please email me.simonchang@qnap.com
Thanks
Hrel - Tuesday, September 20, 2011 - link
Quick search found 940 online. No hard drives inluded. Bahaha, no.MobiusStrip - Wednesday, September 21, 2011 - link
That's just ridiculous. There's no reason you should have to put drives in sleds. They should go in like cartridges, with a simple Eject button to remove them. Like these toaster-style drive docks:http://www.newertech.com/products/hdddocks.php
If locks are all that important, the lock could be above each slot and simply move a bar down to lock the drive in.
ZPrime - Friday, September 23, 2011 - link
In many systems, caddies help with noise isolation. I have several HP Home Servers and the caddies are plastic, but they have silicone/rubber grommets around a metal peg that attaches to the drives. They are tool-less, FWIW.Caddies can also help insure proper grounding. Depending on your chassis composition (some are plastic or have plastic rails), you might need some other way to get the body of the drive to ground to the chassis. Plastic caddy + metal inserts that connect to a metal latch or similar can solve this problem.
ZPrime - Wednesday, September 21, 2011 - link
Just because you have an LACP bonded connection between two machines does *NOT* mean that transfers will take full advantage of this. When you were testing for performance, did you run multiple simultaneous transfers?LACP / 802.3ad load balancing isn't as simple as people think. Bonding a pair of 1GB NICs doesn't give you "2GB of bandwidth."
Nenad - Friday, September 23, 2011 - link
In short: iSCSI >> SMB for small files and when file-cache can be usedI have QNAP TS-459 Pro+ and QNAP TS-419P , and I use them both with SMB and iSCSI.
In your test, performance of iSCSI is similar to SMB, even with write cache disabled in most parts.
But in my practice I find iSCSI has noticeably better performance in many cases, especially when you work with many small files. That can be seen on your test in 'DIR copy', but as just one number among dozen other it does not stand out. Unfortunately, it is mostly DIR copy where you need or notice speeds - copying single file will usually end fast regardless of SMB/iSCSI, video playback needs much smaller bandwith anyway etc ... it is copy of large folders with subfolders you need (and notice) speed.
Another area where iSCSI seems to have advantage is with using file-cache on windows. I'm not precisely certain how that works, but it appears that windows do not use caches so efficiently for networked/remote disk, as it does for 'local' iSCSI disk.
One practical application of this is anti-virus scanners, who tend to scan 'other' disk when you copy files - resulting in almost double time needed to copy file to/from QNAP, since for example first Norton read file from SMB share to scan, and then allows Windows to copy it locally. With iSCSI I see much smaller impact , and I believe that while Norton probably work same with reading file to scan, Windows can better use file cache to skip another reading when it needs to copy.
Carlu - Monday, October 3, 2011 - link
I love this small boxes, good power-performance ratio, but it sux when it comes to fulldisk crypto. nether the CPU has any good support for it, nor does it handles harddrives with inbuilt disk crypto. And for the same amount of money you get a 20W Xeon 20L, and a micro atx motherboard/chassi etc... and the Xeon has support for AES-IN instruction set...