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Final Update on the QNAP TS-473A

I don’t think there’s likely to be much of a need for another update that addresses the TS-473A as a unit. I’ve now had the unit for about two years. This is what has worked well, and what hasn’t.

The biggest disappointment was the tech support provided by QNAP. This is, perhaps, unsurprising, as tech support tends to be the dark underbelly of tech products these days. There’s no glory in providing good customer support (although a counter-example has convinced my son on a certain high-cost purchase, which is a story for another time). It would be preferable for the equipment and software to just work, but when it doesn’t, having competent people handling the support is a challenge.

It’s worth noting the hardware again. I still have no complaints about the TS-473A from a hardware perspective. It is inferior to the Synology system I have in terms of the drive bays, but the Synology isn’t a complete x64 system that can be used in multiple ways, and my understanding is that the Synology NAS systems are also not generic enough to install arbitrary x64 operating systems on them.

During my early experiments with the TS-473A one of the latches for a drive sled broke. They are rather flimsy, and I wasn’t handling it particularly harshly. The latch still works, but the “lock” broke off, and the drive can no longer be locked into place.

I contacted QNAP support, as the device was basically new, and was told that this was not covered under warranty, but that I could buy a new drive sled for (IIRC) $25. Well, it’s perhaps not surprising that it wasn’t covered under warranty, and it is at least nice that replacement sleds are available, but it’s not superlative service.

Never mind, I have a 25% failure of drive locks, but that’s mostly significant in terms of keeping from accidentally pulling a drive while it’s in use.

Last year’s update was about the changes in the way we handled our media server needs. I had started using Container Station to manage docker images of the servers that our family uses. (Primarily Jellyfin.)

Over the course of the last year, we found that this solution was very imperfect. At irregular intervals the servers would disappear from the network without explanation. When I investigated, I found that the docker containers were no longer running, and no amount of persuasion would get them running again.

Container Station does have pretty nice tools for cloning docker containers, but it was hit-or-miss to get these to actually run (frequently failing with the same error as the original containers) and when they did I sometimes had to mess with changing IP addresses for the servers, changing ports, etc. In short, my non-technical wife had to bear with her movies being in constant flux vis-à-vis where they were on the network.

This all came to a head around Thanksgiving of this year (end of November for non-US readers). The servers had come down, and no amount of cloning and coaxing would return them to service. In desperation, I contacted customer support.

I opened the support ticket on December 4, and I contacted them yesterday to tell them that my solution was to no longer use their software. During the interval, I sent them log files, screen shots, videos of using the system, etc. Although my case was “escalated” to a level 2 technical team, I was never given the privilege of communicating with them directly, needing to pass all communication back and forth via the same level 1 tech who was handling the issue.

The Tier 2 team really wanted to remote into my system. One of the reasons this was significant for me is that the QuTS Hero OS spends a lot of effort trying to convince users that we need an account with QNAP, and that we need to be syncing our NAS with their cloud. Well, QNAP is a popular enough storage solution that they have become a preferred target for hackers. It’s quite a compliment when one’s OS is individually targeted for compromise, however it exemplifies the problem with single-point-of-failure systems. If all of your eggs are in one basket, you need to make very certain that your basket is protected from threats to eggs.

My NAS is not Internet-exposed, and I was not keen on either exposing it to the Internet, and then giving credentials to outsiders, nor to having a remote session with these outsiders.

A brief note: Communication was significantly hampered by the fact that the support seems to be in Taiwan. Although the English was fine, the timing of support replies makes me think that their time zone is roughly opposite mine. While this is understandable, it made the whole process take much longer than it would otherwise. I don’t know if they would have made an effort to schedule a remote session during my availability, or if the mysteriously obscured level two team would have required me to make my system available at 1 am. If you’ve had experience with their support in this regard, I’d appreciate a comment.

In any case, although I had already sent them logs, etc., they insisted that the only way forward was to give outside access to my system, and that’s something I am very loathe to do. I decided that it was time to try the other feature that pulled me to the QNAP unit in the first place.

I spent several days using rsync to copy everything from the QNAP to an 8TB drive in my Synology JBOD unit. This done, I installed a graphics card in the QNAP and began to play around with various alternative OSes. I also made VMs of these OSes on my system, to look at them from that angle.

I was hoping to be able to pull the existing zfs pool into the new NAS system to avoid having to copy everything back in, so I focused on Linux-based products, since QuTS is Linux-based, and bsd and Linux handle zfs slightly differently.

In the end, I installed TrueNAS SCALE, the Linux variety of TrueNAS. Although it was able to see the zfs pool left behind by QuTS, it wasn’t able to import it, and I ultimately reformatted the four drives and rebuilt the pool.

That said, I’m very impressed with TrueNAS running on the QNAP hardware. It’s considerably more responsive that QuTS was, and has a nice interface, including a dashboard that shows me system information like core temperature, RAM utilization, etc. Once I committed to reformatting the storage pool, it did so quickly, and I was able to restore everything (using rsync, again) quite quickly. It not only supports docker, but it also supports the same sort of VM installation that I never particularly used on QuTS.

The docker management console is worlds better than Container Station, including the fact that it prefers bridging the network connections to the containers. This means I no longer need to try to manage static IPs for each of the servers.

I no longer have to bounce around between several similarly-named tools to try to figure out which one does the specific management task I’m looking for, and my all-important Jellyfin server was up and running in no time at all. Although iX systems does try to upsell the TrueNAS software, with cloud-backing and service contracts, and so on, it is so far a background thing, and I don’t feel I’m being badgered into it.

I’m looking forward to installing one of the llm applications featured in the “App Discovery” portion of the software. I haven’t yet pulled an arbitrary docker container from Docker Hub, since everything I’ve needed has been included.

Bottom line

I’m still pretty happy with the hardware of the TS-473A. For the price, a Ryzen-based PC with four hot-swappable drive bays and high-speed Internet built-in is a good deal. It booted to a variety of external thumb-drives without needing to dig into the bios (but, a caution — if you insert a bootable usb device and then reboot, you may be puzzled as to why your NAS isn’t starting if you don’t have a screen attached).

QuTS Hero is an ambitious effort by a hardware vendor to have a plug-and-play OS that does what you need. Unfortunately, it seems more tailored to QNAP’s business needs than mine.

Fortunately, TrueNAS SCALE installed without a hitch, and if I buy another QNAP device (probably to mirror my NAS offsite) I will probably just put TrueNAS on out of the gate.

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Update on the QNAP TS-473A

It’s been almost a year since I wrote about the QNAP NAS system, and I thought it appropriate to talk about some updated experiences.

First, I’m no longer using the DLNA server as the primary way to stream media. It’s not that it didn’t work, but it was clunky, and I knew my wife would never be happy with it.

This led to a lot of experimentation. Over the same period of time, it became clear that her iMac needed a system software update to continue to be useful as an Internet-facing machine, and since Apple does not support that model of iMac with updates, I installed Linux Mint on it.

The Linux install was easy and straightforward, and I installed a couple of things to make it look a little more Mac-like for her, but Kodi continued to give us problems, and even seemed to be more unstable than before. It certainly didn’t work well with the DLNA from the QNAP (I am still making video available from the old TrueNAS system, although it doesn’t get any new rips) and I could see that my wife was getting very frustrated.

I decided to try a different tack. I have a free account with Plex, but in my experience, they only let you stream your local content locally if you also have a paid subscription. I may be misunderstanding that, or maybe it only applies to the clients, or something, but I could never get it to do what I wanted it to do.

I then looked at Emby, and ran into some similar issues, but then I tried Jellyfin, which was a fork of an earlier version of Emby. Not only does it have a native client, it also just works in a web browser.

Back to the QNAP. QNAP ships with software called ContainerStation. This software allows one to install and run docker containers on the NAS. It allows installation from Docker Hub, which opens up the possibilities for a vast array of software running on the NAS.

One of the drawbacks of ContainerStation is that it is difficult to modify a docker configuration after it is created — specifically to change the list of file system folders that are mounted inside the docker environment. However, since it is so easy to spin up a second copy of a container and configure it the way you want, this isn’t as bad a deal as it might otherwise be.

I installed a Jellyfin docker container, and my wife is now happy with the streaming media available on her iMac. It’s easy for me to add content to, to modify metadata, etc., and she benefits from all the changes I make.

Second, there’s also a docker image for calibre-web. I haven’t decided, yet, whether this is my solution, or if I’m going to instead run an image for Calibre itself (running as a headless server). The benefit to running Calibre is that you can easily make virtual libraries based upon metadata, including tags. On calibre-web, you have to add the books one by one to the “shelf” you want them on. On the other hand, I do think the interface looks nicer for calibre-web.

All in all, I’m still quite pleased with QUTS-Hero as an OS on the NAS, and the hardware of the QNAP TS-473A. It is very responsive for what I want to do with it, and in my limited use-case it’s been a good value for the money. That said, the QNAP software for media streaming and control is terrible, and seems designed (like Plex) to try to drive you to their servers and services. No thanks. The reason I do this on-prem is to avoid having your tendrils in my stuff. The fact that ContainerStation makes it relatively painless to do this is a clear win. Also, if I do need a more complete solution of something down the road, I still have the ability to install Ubuntu, etc., to have a more fine-grained software experience.

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QNAP TS-473A First Impressions

Christmas came early at the Wood household, as we decided to make good on years of talk about separating the gift-giving from the celebration of the Savior’s birth. Picking a day when we would all be available, and so on, we settled on December 18.

One of the new toys is the QNAP NAS system referenced in the post title.

The interface could be a little more explanatory, and I was glad that I had read up to know that I would need to select the new QuTS hero OS right away if I wanted to use it.

OS installation took a while, but I just left it running and went to do other things, and before long it was all there.

One reason I wanted to use the new QuTS hero 5 OS is that it uses ZFS1 by default. ZFS is said to be the OS for preventing bit rot, or the gradual degradation of data from random changes to the storage medium, so I’ve been using it on my homebuilt NAS (that currently runs TrueNAS).

QNAP has a pretty good reputation for their software (and are popular enough that they are the targets of specially-designed malware), but I was still a little nervous about migration. Supposedly, you can also wipe the box and put another OS on it (like TrueNAS), so I could theoretically end up with a similar setup to what I have, but on more NAS-friendly hardware. Still, I have been struggling with the media streaming element of my home server setup.

We’ve traditionally been using file shares and Kodi to stream our media around the house, but it didn’t work quite as well as we’d like. For one thing, running Kodi on each machine that wanted to consume media meant that we had a separate library on each machine. Some of our media is a little quixotic, and the “matches” found in the movie database were usually not very family-friendly. Trying to get the info updated on all client machines was frustrating.

So far, the new QNAP looks promising as a way to get around some of these difficulties. For one thing, the DLNA2 implementation “just works”. (My client is VLC, which I had generally avoided as a media player in the past, but the interface has gotten a lot better.) This should mean that I can edit the metadata for my music, movies, and TV shows, and the clients (including Kodi) will pull that information when they connect to the DLNA server.

What about the hardware?

Drive installation was really painless. It’s a “nearly” tool-free process that is tool-free if you want it to be. Basically, the device uses drive sleds (provided) that have the old clip-style drive rails. They attach to the outside of the sled and poke through the holes into the mounting screw holes on the drive. For better retention, you can (optionally) use the provided3 screws to secure the drive to the sled using the screw holes on the underside of the drive.

It’s not as simple and straightforward as the sled-free system on the Synology JBOD4 system I have, but I really have no complaints.

There are USB ports on the front of the device, and you can program an action to take place when the button on the front is pressed. (Basically, do you want to automatically import media to your server — like connecting your camera, for instance — or back up to NAS storage, etc.)

There are also USB ports on the back, so you can attach more storage (like the Synology JBOD device I have) if the four drive bays (in my model) aren’t enough for you, and you don’t want to spring for a whole new NAS system.

Other details

There are a lot of options for connecting the QNAP to other storage services, either to use cloud services as a backup to the QNAP, or to use the QNAP as a local cache of the cloud services. You can link it together with other NAS devices to back up off-site, so it really makes it easy to make backups, rather than just copies.

I mentioned ZFS briefly when I started this post — one of the other features of ZFS is that it can very easily make RAID systems of varying flexibility. It’s relatively easy to add and remove drives from the RAID, and as long as you’re patient, and your hardware isn’t too slow, you shouldn’t lose data. I have four 8TB drives that will end up living in this QNAP, and that should provide a certain amount of redundancy to the data storage in this NAS.

Final observation, before I go back to playing with this thing: QuTS provides an app called Ubuntu Linux Station, that allows me to install an Ubuntu 20.04 or 18.04 VM on the NAS. While this is terrible overkill for most things that I want a NAS to do, it does allow me a simple way to set up a Calibre Content Server on the network. I’ve been running one from my desktop, but not only will I feel better with that stuff stored away from the rest of my stuff (okay, backed up, since I’ll be keeping a copy of everything on my computer, too), but it will make it easier for me to convince my family to look to the network for ebooks.

I’m sure as time goes by I will find out other things that I want this server to do, and so far I’m really impressed by the flexibility of the QuTS to let me do them.