Qnap Swap

[Vernie Montagna]

Formodern businesses, one of the greatest challenges is to select and set up a reliable network-attached storage server to secure and share important data to increase work efficiency. Meanwhile, the necessity to reduce the risk of data loss by backing up data increases the demand for higher capacity storage. With the increasing storage capacity of hard drives, QNAP provides a solution to hot swap lower capacity drives with larger capacity drives so that your QNAP Turbo NAS can grow with your business.

The QNAP Turbo NAS series provides a high-performance and low-TCO (total cost of ownership) solution for modern businesses. In addition to best-in-class hardware specifications and easy-to-use applications, the QNAP Turbo NAS series also offers innovative features such as Online RAID Capacity Upgrade (for example, replace three 500GB hard drives with three 1TB hard drives) and Online RAID Level Migration (for example, RAID level migration from RAID 1 to RAID 5). These advanced features used to be exclusive to corporations with large budgets, but QNAP implements an intuitive way to allow more businesses to enjoy these powerful technologies.

The first experiences were bad. But experimenting revealed that seemingly not the RAM size was the reason but instead its default startup configuration leading to overload of that Intel (J3455) CPU. Overloading leads to automatic reboot.

Changing this startup configuration to a meaningful low of services and removing known vulnerable services made these overloads disappear. I can only assume that the fix of startup configuration alone had this affect while removing known vulnerable services just increased stability to prevent other unintended reboots.

I.e. which special configuration to use or to avoid or which further services have known memory leaks requiring to limit or preventing its use (leading to recommended restart of these services or the NAS)?

So far I only know that the JAVA VM available of #QNAP is known to be vulnerable and its use discouraged by oracle . This implies that services available by #QNAP depending on JAVA VM will not work either as long as not creating a packet to integrate the latest JAVA VM recommended by oracle .

The original amount of RAM was too small to evaluate the services offered by QNAP. A look at system requirements for installing or using some of these services in the QNAP service (called Apps there) directory was sufficient. With low RAM prices more evaluation seems possible. I even saw fitting RAM modules to try 64 GB. But that price was much higher and seemed to me too risky.

One idea is to create a mirror on the NAS for backup and restore purposes of a productive web site which is colocated at an ISP in the Internet, and to create another test mirror to make redesigns first there instead of the preview area at the ISP side.

As already written before, I had an assumption of the cause of this initial CPU overload which was the NAS startup configuration. I successfully disabled automatic service startups not needed during operating system startup and all CPU overloads have gone.

As I saw QNAP NAS devices in this forum and in the product reviews but not this model, I tried my request if others have done some evaluations already and not yet reported and if this might help me in my evaluation.

Anyway, I found that only 20% swap file was in use and the main culprit was QVRpro not the transcoding, so its Qnaps App that is causing the error to be displayed even though there is plenty of space left.

The QSwap QPKG is the solution of OOM issue before next QTS release. It can be applied to QTS 4.2.0 or later version. Once it is installed and enabled, a 16-GB swap file will be created on the default volume. The original smart swap file feature will be disabled if this NAS supports it. After uninstalling this QPKG, the swap file feature will be enabled again.

I have just recently installed on my QNAP NAS (TS-453B) the latest version of Rclone (V. 1.50.0) but in the last couple of weeks, since I have installed it, I am getting my RAM (8 GB installed) totally saturated.

Looking at the background processes it looks like PLEX and Rclone are taking most of the RAM. Rclone is taking a whopping 3.5GB of RAM. I am also getting a warning message saying that swap memory usage is too high.

Linux has a couple of very useful built-in file editors. vi is a very useful one. vi originated as a mode of a file editor called ex, which was a line editor that grew with the changes in technology until it had a visual mode that users activated...

I quickly got a new disk. The old disk was a WD Red 6TB WD60EFRX, the new one is a WD Red 6TB WD60AFEX. I hot-swapped the disks. According to the documentation, the new disk should be detected automatically, and the storage pool should automatically start rebuilding ("Rebuilding" state). But nothing happened.

I checked the UI, Storage & Snapshots tool. The storage pool was still in degraded state, but all four disks were now green and healthy. However, disk 3 was listed as "not a member" of the storage pool. When I selected to Manage the pool, I could do nothing. The only action that was not disabled was "Rebuild RAID Group", but when I tried that there were no free disks to add to the RAID group.

So the problem appeared to be that disk 3 had been detected and was in use, but still it was listed as "not a member" of the storage pool. No actions were available in the UI to fix the situation. Pulling out the disk and inserting it again did not change anything. Googling for help showed that others have encountered similar situations, but no solutions helped me.

For some reason the NAS did not correctly add the /dev/sdc3 disk partition to the storage pool. The disk had been correctly partitioned and the partitions formatted, and the other RAID arrays had apparently recovered, but not /dev/md1. Adding /dev/sdc3 manually to /dev/md1 fixed the problem.

One more thing: it looks like /etc/config/mdadm.conf and /etc/config/raidtab are missing. /etc/mdadm.conf and /etc/raidtab existed as symbolic links to the non-existent files. I'm not sure that they are needed, but as a precaution I created them. mdadm.conf is created like this:

I meet the same problem with my raid 1 (two ssd). When I restart my ts551, one ssd failed. The light is on and the system can read notice this disk, but raise "not a member" error when i try to rebuild raid 1. Neither can i erase it. Then I followed these instructions and it worked!

Thanks for your blog!!!

I had all the same issus as described in the post on QNAP 431P-1. One of the disks (disk 2) had failed, that the storage pool was in a "Degraded" state. Disk 2 shoud have been ok, SMART info all ok. Ran a scan for bad blocks, overnight. Came back ok & disk was green. However the raid would not rebuild & that there were no free disks to add to the RAID group. I would have followed the instructions here, but I was unable to configure SSH on in step 3 below - Unable to get a browser connection to enable SSH. By the time I followed steps 4 through 6 it had started rebuilding.

QNAP support helped to get my degraded RAID 5 array back available online, but didn't fix the replacement disk showing as not being a member.

Your information has been excellent, allowing me to add the disk back in as described.

Sincerely grateful for the clear description. All the best, Damian

I had the same issue with raid building. My Disk3 failed and I swapped it with a new drive. But the rebuilding is not happening. Now my second disk is already in a warning condition. So I am trying hard to get this raid rebuild with the Disk3.

I encountered the same problem as described above and executes all steps indicated in ssh window. All results are the same apart from the fact it concerns my sda disk instead of sdc as in the example. When trying to add the sda disk I am gettin the following error message:

mdadm --manage /dev/md1 --add /dev/sda3

mdadm: add new device failed for /dev/sda3 as 4: Invalid argument

I like to enable disk spindown within my NAS to save on power consumption. This behaviour should be enabled by default, but in my case it wasn't working correctly. After some time scouring the internet, I found that many users were having the same issues.

QTS creates a RAID1 array across all your drives inside of your NAS for it's OS storage. Initially I thought this was a clever idea. But it can (and will) prevent your drives from spindown. Even if you have a NVMe SSD installed. Since SSD's rarely die from wear in normal use, I decided to disable this RAID1 array most of the time.

Since I've added 8GB of RAM to my NAS, I decided to disable swap memory. Because swap is also shared between (hard)drives. You could also add a swap file on the NVMe storage if you still want swap enabled.

I recently bought a WD MYBOOK LIVE DUO 4TB NAS which came with 2 * 2TB WD Green HDDs. I would, now, like to upgrade these HDDs with 2 * 6TB WD RED NAS HDDs. To enquire about the possibility and the correct procedure, I sent an email to WD Customer Support 4 days ago but have not recieved an answer. Therefore I was wondering if some one else has had any such luck or experiance, the advise would be highly appriciated. Thank you.

You can only replace the drives with completely the same model and size. And always only one drive at the time, since they contain the operating system, so replacing both at the same time would make the device useless.

Thanks for your input. Although it is possible to install a bigger HDD in the enclosure (without the availability of the additioinal storage space), I find it interesting that you were able to swap the bigger HDD with a small HDD without any issues. In this particular case, it appears that the OS fixed everyting itself.

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