A racing NAS under ZFS
This big, affordable NAS is an excellent surprise: QTS plus ZFS on a multi-bay chassis with a powerful processor.
Mounted in a "triple tier" with two 480GB Seagate IronWolf Pro 125 SATA SSDs in RAID 1 for system and applications (273GB available after 10% over-provisioning and typical installation), two 960GB WD SN640 U.2 NVMe SSDs for cache acceleration and internal ZFS cooking, and finally, five 16TB Seagate Exos X16 drives in single parity Raid-Z for storage (56.2TB usable),
In short, it's very heavy, and you can feel it in the tests: you're 20 to 30 times faster in input/output than with a classic Raid 5 NAS, without SSD cache, such as the TS-451x from Qnap. The network speeds are maintained, whether it's on the 2.5 Gb/s or 10 Gb/s connections, it's a blast.
The installation is quick and easy if you remember that QTS Hero must be installed on the first pool of SSDs created (just plug in the two useful SSDs). The application catalogue is well stocked, a constant at Qnap, and updates are frequent. As for stability, nothing to say after 200 hours of uninterrupted testing on a 15 TB dataset.
All in all, very highly recommended. Its little brother in 8 GB is AMA comparatively less interesting: why limit the performance of ZFS with a narrow memory? 32 GB are impeccable.
A few complaints that explain my rating:
- external power supply via a 120W brick, sufficient even in maximum disk configuration, but I would have liked to have two input ports to be able to use a second brick and benefit from some redundancy
- no PCI Express expansion slot(s), no controller and no video outputs, but you can forgive it at this price.
- solid plastic drive drawers and keys/lockers which are a bit of a mess on such a classy machine.
- shy gen 2 front USB 3 port: seems to cap at 5 Gb/s
