Hi,
These disks are Seagate ST8000DM004, same than the previous I had.
There are no errors reported. I’ll run the diagnostics again as soon as I can.
Thanks for your help
Looks like those are SMR drives, at least according to a quick google search. That could be a part of your issue.
but it did work perfectly with the same drive types/models since 3-4 years !
Not saying this IS your issue, just something you should read about, just in case. It could explain why your previous drives failed and you are having issues with the new ones. Honestly, I don’t know enough about it to say if it applies to you or not. but it seems to fit.
@dosborne Thanks for that drive lesson. Interesting. I would have assumed that all NAS drives are appropriate (ie: CMR) but it appears that is not necessarily the case with WD. Good to know!
Thanks.
This is not the first time I use this serie of disks from Seagate, my previous QNAP was using the same, and they worked around 8 years without any issue…
I’ve launched last night a test on the drives, it’s still ongoing (not sure it is significant, but one is 40 % and the other 10 %).
Is there a tool I can use to test individual drive perfs inside the QNAP ?
I have some Seagate drives that have been running for over 15 years. The manufacturer is not the problem, the SMR technology is (or may be in your case). The issue of CMR vs SMR vs use in RAID is the important factor and I encourage you to investigate this.
I’ve used SEATools (or whatever they call it now) to perform diagnostics on Seagate drives in the past. You may be able to get some information via SMART in the NAS, but it wouldn’t be as comprehensive.
yes, but as my drives are active in the NAS, I would like to check them with some tools in it if that exists.
I tried to install DA Drive Analyzer, but it fails starting…
Like written before I started a complete test on both drives yesterday night. Now HDD2 is 70 %, HDD1 is 10 % of completion. Don’t know if the tests really run in parralel, but if it is the case, something’s going wrong with HDD1…
Hi @dosborne
thanks again for your informations on CMR vs SMR. Very good information I wasn’t aware of (even working as a sales engineer at a storage company… we don’t use these kind of drives).
I’ve bought 2 new drives (CMR this time) and replaced the SMR ones.
There has been a sensible increase in performances.
I’ve been able to restart my timemachine backups, started with an empty share, connected through a wired connection, and it has been able to backup the whole macbook pro.
But now, each time it starts a backup, it’s doing a full backup again… I don’t understand what Timemachine is doing, because each backup needs one day to complete, and it uses 700 GB !
Any idea ?
TimeMachine is a weird animal.
First - is it really using 700GB each time? It may say it is, but it probably isn’t. What it is doing is backing up 700 GB (likely the size of your data) and it has to go through every single file to see if it is modified and if so then it backs that up to the NAS. The scanning process takes quite a while. I don’t think it should take a whole day always but I have seen my backups take hours and that’s doing the incremental thing.
Check to see if the actual space being used on the QNAP is 700 x # of Backups. I bet it is quite a bit less than that.
Unfortunately yes.
Just checked on the NAS, the share has 1.5 TB+ used over 2 TB, with 2x TM backups finished, and another one just running now. My laptop drive is around 650 GB used.
Very strange, this is like TM is doing a full backup each time.
That’s very strange. Does TM recognize the drive as having existing backups?
Maybe post a screenshot of your settings. I don’t know about timemachine as I don’t have Apple products, but there may be relevant options. It could be whatever selection you’ve made that determines whether or not a file is “new” or “changed”.
That would be my understanding. I have 5 identical model drives and the tests all progress at a similar rate and finish within a few minutes of each other.
Yes.
Tried yesterday to destroy the share, to reset all the timemachine config on the mac (found a post on file to delete to reset parameters to default), and recreated the backup.
Same behaviour, it starts the backup, and seems to have it finished.
BUT I found that in fact it stops before 100 % completion (but can’t find why), and it restarts the backup process, keeping the data already pushed.
As an example for 640 GB of live data, on my 2 TB share, if the backup stops at 500 GB completion, the share has 1.5 TB free, TM restarts a full backup and so on…
At the end I see 2 problems :
- can’t find why my backups fail, even on wired connection (I have good performances with 700-900 Gb/s peaks on 1 Gb link !)
- why is timemachine keeping the data already transfered and restarts the backup from the beginning ? it should delete already transfered data (as I assume it is not able to restart from the point of failure)
a lot of questions, and my backup is still unavailable
it worked well for so many years…
That is really odd. Have you opened a ticket with QNAP support?
Finally I don’t think it’s a QNAP issue.
I’ve just tested the same with an USB HDD. The behaviour is the same.
On my 2TB disk, I’ve started a first TM backup : 650 GB used (my macbook data). Here, no issue, it’s the first backup.
Then I relaunch a backup immediately. It should be quick as there are no or very few changes. It copies 650 GB…
With 3 backups my HDD is full, and the backups fail
Something made my timemachine going crazy, but it seems that it is not QNAP related. So I need to change forum 