Hello everyone,
After using NAS for a long time, I wonder if anyone else has encountered this annoying problem: Even when you’re not transferring files, the NAS hard drive keeps making “click, click” sounds as it reads and writes, and just can’t go into quiet sleep mode?
Recently, I’ve been looking into QNAP’s QuLog Center (Log Center) and discovered this might be one of the reasons. The system keeps generating operation logs, but what puzzles me the most is: Why doesn’t QNAP let me store these logs on an external USB flash drive?
Why do I think “saving to USB” is so important?
-
Let the hard drive truly rest: System logs are written constantly. If they’re stored on the main hard drive, the drive is forced to keep spinning. If we could offload these small, frequent writes to a cheap flash drive, our expensive enterprise-grade hard drives could sleep quietly, saving power and extending their lifespan.
-
It’s the “black box” in case of failure: Imagine if one day your NAS suffers a hard drive failure or system crash, and you can’t even access the web interface or mount the disk volume—how do you get help? If the logs are on a flash drive, you can just unplug it, connect it to a computer, and immediately see what happened last; but now, since QNAP forces logs onto the hard drive, if the drive fails, the failure logs disappear with it.
-
Security considerations: Just like an airplane’s black box is stored separately, it’s safer to keep “logs” and “data” in different places.
[The current awkward situation] I’ve seen quite a few discussions on foreign forums (see attached image), and even after plugging in and formatting a USB drive, QNAP’s settings menu simply won’t let you select USB as the destination. It feels like this is intentionally locked by the software, not a technical limitation.
[Questions for experienced users]
-
Has anyone successfully used some “hidden trick” to redirect logs to a USB drive?
-
Does anyone care about the issue of hard drives not being able to sleep because of log writes?
I genuinely think this is a very practical little feature, and I hope that through discussion, the official team will notice and add this flexibility in future updates. After all, having more options is always a good thing for users!