I’ve now been running QuTS Hero on my TS-873A for almost 48 hours and I thought I would give some thoughts/impressions on it for anyone who is thinking about potentially migrating to this OS from the standard QTS OS. I decided I wanted to run Hero as I needed to reinstall the OS on my NAS anyhow. I wanted to take advantage of the WORM feature for storing some documents as a recent breach business system I work with was recently hit with a ransomeware attack. They got one of my PCs and attempted to access my QNAP but couldn’t. So WORM just adds another layer of security to things that I definitely need to keep.
With that, here’s my thoughts on QuTS Hero and upgrading:
1.) First of all, understand that you will start over from ground zero with QuTS Hero. You cannot backup and recover your operating system settings. This means ALL your settings for all apps, everything will be gone. You will need to re-do everything including all your preferences, what apps you have, snapshots (more on that later), backups, restores, etc.
2.) You will completely wipe out your drives when upgrading. So make sure that anything you don’t want to lose is backed up before proceeding.
3.) Since you lose all information/settings, if you use something like Hybrid Backup Sync, you won’t be able to recover your files to their original locations. You will need to recover them somewhat manually (HBS recovers the files just fine - select the “latest” backup and not everything otherwise you will recover data multiple times).
Now thoughts on QuTS Hero:
1.) For the most part it looks/feels very much like the standard QTS OS. All the same apps, etc. Same look of the UI, etc.
2.) The biggest difference is in storage. And I’ll explain these differences as best I can.
First of all, the ZFS format seems to use a bit more space in the formatting process you you have less actual storage space available. My main array is a RAID 5 consisting of four 10TB drives. I swear that previously, I had a total storage space of about 28TB, but under ZFS it’s about 26 TB. I still haven’t fully wrapped my head around this but it seems like you will lose some amount of storage space over EXT4 used by QTS.
Second, the way shared folders are done is completely different. This, to me, is the biggest change in QuTS Hero. Shared folders are now created in Storage and Snapshots and are treated like actual storage volumes. You now have to set a storage size for the share. And you set individual things like compression and deduplication, etc. And you can perform snapshots on individual shared folders in addition to snapshots of the entire storage pool. I’m not entirely certain yet what benefit you get from doing snapshots of shared folders vs. the entire pool. And you can set if the shared folder is thick (meaning all the space is allocated to it at once) or thin. This whole quota allocation for shared folders is a bit of a paradigm shift. But for extremely large storage spaces (like QuTS can handle), I guess it make sense as in a large environment you can more easily manage that storage space.
Anyhow, beyond that, I haven’t seen too much difference yet. I have been busy transferring data and getting things back up to speed. Just wanted to post my observations.
Edit: One other cool thing about shared folders in QuTS Hero is that you can set different block sizes. So if your share has a lot of large video files, you can set a 128K block size. If it’s a lot of smaller sizes, you can set a block size down to 4K. That’s actually a really cool feature and can help to save storage space since smaller files don’t need to take up an entirely 128K block when they are maybe 8K in size.