Trying this forum as there does not appear to be much using Google search.
QNAP TS432PXU-RP has high activity on the 2 HD’s running in RAID 1 mode. It appears that this has started when I updated to the last 5.1 series firmware and continued with the very latest 5.2 series firmware.
There does not appear to be anything wrong with the drives (Tested for bad blocks) but occasionally the SMB network is slow to respond for several seconds. It was not like this when running on older firmware.
and have you looked yourself at the resource monitor?
I am not sure how you expect us to guess what is wrong.
do you have your NAS open to the internet? ie port forwarding or upnp?
what apps are you running. what devices have access to your NAS? are you mapping drives from a pc to your NAS? do any PCs scan your shared drives with AV?
the list is endless but you have given nothing for us to comment on.
Yes, I should have known better, I had actually done a number of tests but failed to give the results of those with the question. I guess my hope was that this was a known issue and someone would say, yes look at this or that and fix it:-)
So here we go:
QNAP Firmware: QTS 5.2.3006
QNAP hardware: TS-432PXU-RP with 16GB RAM
Hard drives: Seagate ST12000NM001G-2MV103
The hard drive activity does not change when disconnecting from the network.
There are no processes that appear to take up any large amount of resources.
There is no excessive network traffic while network is connected.
UPnP is disabled.
No QNAP cloud setup for the NAS (Security measure).
No external port mapping from the Internet.
NAS access to Internet for outbound connections only (For firmware updates).
NAS set up with SMB 2.1 and 3.x protocols.
All other services disabled except DHCP (Serves a /24 network).
Thank you for your reply. Unfortunately the issue is not about putting the drives into standby. The NAS is SMB only and there will always be some file access from Windows boxes.
My concern has been that the drives are active all the time, even when you unplug the network. That means that there is some process running that constantly accesses the drives, even when there is nothing coming in from outside the NAS.
When I have a text file open for 10-15 minutes, my Debian Linux randomly reports that the file has changed on disk (The NAS) and asks me to reload the file from disk. There is no change to the file content. The Linux machine uses SMB to connect to the NAS. I think the NAS is “touching” the file, maybe updating the file attributes or permissions and those changes are being picked up by my Linux machine.
The side effect of all this is that opening and saving files can sometimes take up to 10-12 seconds and it is random. Most of the time (7 out of 10 saves) are instant. This behaviour is also happening on my Windows boxes.
I think that whatever is accessing the drives all the time is causing the slowdown in opening and saving files.
I have recently (Early December 2024) updated to the latest QTS 5.1x series of firmware and most recently (January) QTS 5.2.3.3006 (Latest).
I did read the document and it did not help me find the issue.
the 10-12 second lag would suggest either disk hardware or network
open up a ssh session against your NAS and run “top” - then monitor that whilst you open and save files on one of your PC’s it may show something taking up cpu usage when accessing your files.
you could use htop also but would need to install the qpkg first. htop (cli) - MyQNAP
failing any of that raise a ticket with QNAP and let them investigate your issue.
I already tried “top” to see what was using resources and nothing uses much 1-2% max for any process.
I have become suspicious of the network because a colleague just told me about some issues connecting to another QNAP from a different location in the network and that QNAP used to work well, just like the one referred to in this post. It is unlikely that 2 QNAP units would have issues at the same time.
This still does not explain why the disks have heaps of access happening, even when unplugging the network from the QNAP.
Maybe there are 2 issues at play at the same time. Something on the QNAP and something on the network - hmmmmm
