I am new to QNAP NAS, and I’m in the process of populating my new to me system TS-251D with 2 x WD Red NAS Pro 14TB drives.
I am keeping an eye open for a secondhand TR-002 or 004, but in the meantime, I have some other disks I’d like to add as temporary storage.
I have a Startech 2-bay USB3 RAID enclosure, and I am considering using this to host the additional drives.
What is the compatibility like over USB with non-TR enclosures?
Should I utilise the native RAID controller on the external enclosure?
Will the QNAP deliver software RAID to non-TR enclosures?
What’s the general advice while I wait for a TR enclosure at a reasonable price (to me) to appear on eBay?
Thanks
Could you please provide your expected usage scenario in more detail? Understanding how you plan to use it will help us offer more recommendations.
The NAS will not do RAID on external enclosures.
All non QNAP (approved) enclosures will only work as external storage.
So if you can setup this enclosure with it’s own RAID (e.g. dip switches) it would show up like any other external harddrive (block storage) device
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Third-party enclosures are generally limited to acting as external storage.
If you’re looking to set up a RAID configuration, you’ll indeed need to choose a QNAP product, such as the TR series you mentioned.
You can find more information about the TR-004 here:
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Thank you Sir, yes, slapped in an old drive last night to see and it appears as file-based share. I can work with that for a while.
Thank you Steve, I’ll use it for file-based shares for now.