New User of QNAP NAS TS-212P - slightly puzzled!

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1

Hi All

I am a reasonably experienced user of other NAS devices that has just acquired a used QNAP device with 2 x 4TB mirrored HDDs.

I am puzzled by the extremely SLOW responses of all the administrative tools - it takes minutes for it to do anything!

The drive arrived wiped from a recycler and promptly spent about 36 hours apparently Synchronising the mirrored drives - although there were no files left on them!

The drives report that they are Good (at least in terms of SMART status.

The CPU varies between 28% and 100% (OK I plugged a USB external SSD drive into it which maybe was not a good idea as it is now chuntering away on that).

So is this normal behaviour or have I picked up one with a fault? Are there any tests I can run?

Grateful for any Guru advice!

Regards

Andrew

Environment: No Domain, Home network, various PCs running Win 10, Win 11 (yeaugh!) and Linux.

2

The disks could be slow or faulty(what models?)
The NAS itself is a 16 year old model with a 18-19 year old processor (so do not expect any speed deamon here)

Did you upgrade the firmware after you got the NAS ?

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HI @dolbyman
The disks are Seagate ST4000DM004 4TB
Yes I ran a firmware update but it said already had current version
Must admit I did not realise it was that old a model - it looked as if it was bought 2019. But it seems to transfer files fast enough its just the tools that run like a DAWG!

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It’s a slow, old unit, built back when people were more inclined to allow a slow unit to do its thing in its own time. :wink:

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Key Specifications:

  • Capacity: 4TB (4000GB)

  • Form Factor: 3.5-inch

  • Interface: SATA 6Gb/s (SATA III)

  • Rotational Speed: 5400 RPM

  • Cache (Buffer): 256 MB

  • Data Transfer Rate: Up to 600 MBps (external) / ~190 MBps (internal)

  • These don’t look too bad - SATA III 6GB/s?

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ST..DM disks are notoriously bad in NAS units (SMR desktop disks)

1 Like
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Disable and remove any apps and services that you don’t absolutely need. I’d suggest going one by one through the setup options.

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I would suggest opening an SSH session to the NAS and running TOP. Look at the “load average” value.

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If it is in low single digits that is good. If it’s a high number > 10, then you have an excessive amount of threads in queue. You can have low processor usage but a high load average and the thing will still be a dog.

As @dosborne said, get rid of any apps or processes you don’t really need as those just take up resources.

9

System load average effect will depend on the number of cores the CPU has (and if it supports hyper-threading).

This old Marvell RISC CPU has only a single core, so a load average of just under 1.0 is good (preferably around 0.8 - 0.9). When the load average is higher than this, it becomes a waiting game. :wink:

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Thanks guys. I will take some time to look at these suggestions and report back.

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HI Gurus

OK. I have made a few discoveries after the NAS went down overnight due to a power glitch. (Not its fault - I had accidentally plugged it into a time-switched circuit Doh!).

First is that the clock reset itself back to 1/1/2000 soI am guessing there might be a dead CMOS battery in there somewhere.

And SSHd in and ran top:-

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image862Ă—608 16.9 KB

Of course it cycles through various screens but I did notice mysqld using a lot of RAM.(9.0%)

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image681Ă—421 6.86 KB

I don’t really need MySQL - but can I stop that process safely, and how?

Apart from that I think I have only the services that I need running, including Windows file sharing but would that be using SMB V1?

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OK. Here is a crazy idea… :slight_smile:

I have a 4TB SATA SSD currently plugged in via USB caddy to check the files on it.

This is currently only giving throughput of about 7.5 MB/s presumably as it is through a very slow USB interface. (USB2.0?).

Is it possible to replace one of the disks with this one, and have the other, relatively slower Seagate HDD mirror the files? If I could get the fast write speed afforded by the SSD with the GB Ethernet I would be quite happy, but will the unit support this?

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The HDD’s are not your bottleneck, so that would not help

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Looks like a bunch of apps and services you can remove that are currently impacting performance.

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@dosborne OK - Can you suggest which ones to do without?

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Everything you don’t need :slight_smile:

multimedia, indexing, qsync, qsearch… go through all the apps and system settings and disable, turn off, uninstall everything except samba if that is all you need. I don’t recall off hand what is in that FW release, but your idle utilitzation is high so you must have a number of things running.

HOWEVER, based on the posts, it doesn’t sound like this was truly a clean install. I’d go so far as to suggest that you shut it all down, remove all partitions from the drives, and start all over. There should be any “rebuilding” going on it is was a clean setup (unless one or more drive are fubar to begin with).

My TS-213P runs very well and is close to the same vintage. I’ve disabled everything except samba.

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The TS-231P is from 2017 ..the TS-212 is from 2009

So a bit older

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@dosborne

>>My TS-213P runs very well and is close to the same vintage. I’ve disabled everything except samba.

OK, I will follow your lead on that.
Incidentally I just opened the box to see if there is a RTC battery in there somewhere (have not found it yet!) and the HDDs have a date of Manufacture of July 2021. The device may of course have been upgraded with newer disks but I also notice it has 2 x USB 3.0 which suggests it is not that old?

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I have one of these 212Ps, retired it last year. They are just incredibly slow responding in the Web browser running any app. It is just normal. They transfer files okay and store them, can even run qsync if you can get an old version for your PC but you can die of old age waiting for it to run an app.

regards

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@Colin That seems to be the case with this one. Good to know your experience is similar!