What is "internal drive" vs "external drive" in the software specs?

English Storage
1

Hi everyone!

I’m considering QNAP with ZFS for a large scale long-term storage.

The specs for a TS-1655 list “ZFS” for “internal drive” only:

What is “internal” what is “external” in the sense meant in those specifications?

Thanks! :smile:

2

Hello,

“internal” are the Drives in the NAS

  • 12 x 3.5-inch + 4 x 2.5-inch SATA drive bays
  • and the 2 x M.2 2280 PCIe Gen 3 x2 slots for SSD
  • and the SSD on a PCIe card (3 Slots)

“external” are USB-Drives

3

You can’t use ZFS format on external drives.

I would HIGHLY recommend getting a NAS with more horsepower than an Intel ATOM cpu. That is a very low end processor and if you have a large amount of data and all, you may be very dissatisfied with the performance of the NAS. That is the biggest problems with NAS units on the market. Manufacturers like QNAP put out these really nice looking units with lots of storage options but then put in a really small Intel or ARM CPU. I would get nothing less than an AMD Ryzen or an i3. Spend as much as you can possibly afford on the NAS. You could get a TS-873A or a TS-h973AX-32G for less money and get much better performance. If you are going to spend $1900 go a bit more and get something like a TVS-h874 which is just a few hundred dollars more and has an i5 CPU which will blow the ATOM cpu away.

4

To help us offer some recommendations, would you be able to provide more details about your expected use case or expectations?

Thanks!

5

@SteveKo

I think your copypaste just revealed a little more than you intended. :wink:

6

Hi P3ter,
You can connect the QNAP TL-D1600S (12x HDDs) or the TL-D800C (8x HDDs) and create a second pool on it to use ZFS for your long-term large data storage with the TS-1655 NAS.

Jason

7

Thank you all for your replies!

I was hoping that “internal” meant = the drives in the slots, and external something like “attached by USB”.

@SteveKo : The setup is for a “reasonably” sized NAS for cultural heritage digitization workflows and (mid-to-long term) storage. At least for 5 years.

I’ve calulated with HDD sizes of max. 16 TB each (due to rebuild-time worries). We’ve been using ZFS for years on our Linux servers - so I’m happy to see QNAP offers it now too.

We chose ZFS mainly for snapshot and storage-pool (maintenance and growth) reasons.