Following a recent recovery by QNAP support for an issue where thin volumes could not be mounted due to a thin-pool/device-mapper layer problem, File Station 6 is no longer displaying any files or folders. Shared folders are displaying a “This Folder Is Empty" message. If I revert back to File Station 5 all folders and files are visible.
I have removed and reinstalled File Station 6, but still have the same problem.
Other than this, the NAS is functioning fine with all other applications working normally.
I noticed in your support ticket that File Station 6 seems to be displaying your folders and files again. Could you confirm whether the issue has been resolved? Thanks!
Hi. Yes. It was quite strange. FS6 was not displaying any content (even though FS5 was), but then out of the blue the NAS did an update of both FS5 and FS6, and when that was finished FS5 and FS6 are both working. QNAP support recommended a clean shutdown and restart which I will do shortly. Hopefully things stay working.
Thanks Steve. The shutdown/reboot went smoothly and all apps (including FS6) loaded fine. Then when I came back to it late afternoon the system was unreachable - via web browser or SSH. After waiting and retrying over the next couple of hours I had no choice but try and initiate an orderly restart via the front panel button. The system didn’t respond to the usual (1.5 second) button press, so I had to hold the button to force the system to turn off. After the restart the system initiated a Raid group scrubbing. Most apps seemed to be fine, but FS6 was again playing up and ultimately began showing no files/folders.
As it’s been 3 weeks of going back and forth with these issues (including the thin volume corruption issue) I am at the point of considering a complete system reset/rebuild and restoring all the data. The question in my mind is whether to do this on the current system, or buy a whole new system. In other words are the recent issues I’ve been experiencing purely software related, or could there be hardware issue(s) at play (as well). I really don’t want to go through the rebuild/restore process only to find it starts happening all over again.
Any thoughts would be welcome.
PS: The system is currently running at 99% CPU making it pretty unresponsive to see what is going on.
So what processes do you have running on your NAS? The TS-451+ does not have a very powerful processor. It is entirely possible that you are basically swamping it out and a system rebuild will not help you much. My TS-451 (no plus) runs nearly 100% CPU all the time.
Doing resets and reboots is exceptionally hard on the system and I would guess that your RAID array is in the process of being rebuilt if you did some hard resets on the system. That in and of itself takes a lot of CPU.
Try instead to log into your NAS via SSH. If you can run the top command to see what processes are taking your CPU time. Additionally, look at the Load Average number:
Load average is roughly the number of threads in queue waiting to be processed by the CPU. The J1900 on the 451+ is a quad core/4 thread processor. So it can handle 4 threads at once. If your number is higher than 4, then you will be very very slow.
Depending on what apps you are running, what you are trying to do, etc. it is very possible you have overloaded your NAS. Turn off all apps you don’t absolutely need.
Thanks. Shutting down apps is proving very difficult at the moment as I can’t get enough CPU time to get to the app centre via browser, or even on the Qmanager iOS app. I know that the running apps atm will likely be HBS3, Plex media server, and surveillance station. Typically the NAS runs at around 30-40% CPU load, with the occasional jump to the mid 90’s.
The raid group scrubbing is progressing very slowly so I am going to wait until that is finished before I try and do another shutdown/restart.
First of all the RAID scrubbing is what is slowing you down. That’s an exceptionally disk intensive process and since everything runs off the disks, well, it will just drag your speeds down. I’m not sure if you can schedule when scrubbing runs in QTS like you can in QuTS, but yeah, you won’t have any good speeds during scrubbing.
Then with running HBS, Plex AND Surveillance - you are overworking the NAS. My TS-451 runs just QVR Surveillance and that is more than enough work for it. If you want to have better response times for your other apps, etc. I believe it is time to upgrade to a new NAS.
Also, you say Surveillance Station - that app is EOL and you should upgrade to QVR Surveillance.
I have resigned to the fact that I need to start over. So I’m buying a new NAS, but will also rebuild the current one so I can split the workload - Plex media server and Qmagie on the new (faster) unit and use the old one for the security cameras and backups of the critical data from the new one as well as laptop/tablet backups
Happy for any thoughts on drives for the new unit. The current one has 4 x 4tb Ironwolf Pro drives. They’ve been pretty good given the beating they’ve had. I could go with the same in the new unit, or perhaps the WD equivalent? I’d prefer to get 6tb drives for the new unit, but they seem to be Out of Stock pretty much everywhere.
Also need to consider whether to stay with multiple Thin volumes or a single Thick volume.
I use thin volumes as it allows for flexible storage.
For your new NAS, I would recommend an X86 unit and get the most powerful one you can afford. IMO, the Ryzen V1500B is the least powerful CPU you should look at. If you can afford an i3, i5 or i7 all the better…
