QNAP TS-h686 NAS Review - Setup w/ZFS!

we've given it away in a title because you know you're here to take a look at qnap network attached storage but it's not really network attached storage network type storage is the least important thing that it does if you're new to level one you haven't really been you know and you just clicked on this video let me explain it's not just network attached storage it's basically a computer in a box a xeon in a box that's got form factors for m.2 storage three and a half inch storage and two and a half inch storage it's the best of all worlds in terms of mechanical storage for bulk storage flash storage and also software support it's basically a little server in a box it goes far beyond network attached storage you get pci express expansion you've got media encoding possibilities by deploying a gpu yeah you can put a gpu a video card in a nas what sense does that make well it's basically a little server in a box let's take a look qnap secure data storage and backup this does about everything that you would expect of a nas to do data protection private cloud backups surveillance video cameras you know for your home your business you know your power user everybody's working from home and i think that everybody working from home is even more than previously driving the impetus to have a home server you know you've got laptops and mobile devices and phones and maybe cloud stuff and in a small business you might have an office 365 subscription or g suite subscription you need to be able to back that all up somewhere but also quality of life how cool would it be to have a captive portal on your guest wi-fi network so that when you sign up uh you know you have a guest that comes and signs into your guest wi-fi network they get a web page that's like hey here's all the cool stuff you can do in the house here's our plex media server here's what the tvs are named in all the different rooms here's all this stuff here's the cameras if you need to be able to see if you know the friend is coming from you know and they're parking in the parking lot or whatever you can do all that and it'll run on an appliance like this yes yes you can diy it and you can build it we've done videos on doing that kind of thing as well but qnap has their custom operating system quts hero it's not a super catchy name but it does support zfs and zfs is a really important file system if you really want the best in terms of data backup data protection and to be able to do easy replication between this device and another device there are other technologies but i'm partial to zfs this is the tsh686 it's the four three and a half inch bay version there's also the 886 which includes two more three and a half inch bays if you need a lot of mechanical storage let's unpack now right inside the box you get a power cord you get some ethernet patch cables a quick installation manual and all of the screws that you need for mounting your three and a half four two and a half inch drives so you get a ton of screws you definitely want to save those because those are really low profile screws and you don't want to lose those that's there's also two tiny little heatsinks in there in the bag they're peel and stick and you can use those with your m.2 the really awesome thing about these peel and stick m.2 heatsinks is that a lot of the time with an m.2 the controller the microchip that's the actual controller for the flash memory is the thing that needs to be heat controlled whereas you don't want to heat control the flash memory because flash membrane to operate most optimally actually needs to be a little bit warm in a lot of cases as you can see at the rear here we've got a 250 watt power supply so you're not going to be putting in a super high-end gpu just enough for transcoding or something like that now it looks like we've got a ton of pcie slots here but we've actually just got two slots one full size double height slot and then the other one is sort of a half height half half-length slot if you install the surveillance station software so that you can use this thing with ip cameras or video cameras or anything like that you can install a video card and then have video out and then this thing can plug into a monitor or a tv or something and you can have your uh security cameras displayed on the tv by this thing but out of the box there's no video output but we do have extra connectors so if you get one of the the fancy uh qnap you know half height cards that combines 10 gigabit ethernet along with m.2 you can put that in on this side and still have a full size pci express expansion slot on the other side i really am not kidding when i say that this device is put together basically from like the level one fantasy wish list of a home network server but it's you know in a small compact package there are some trade-offs but it's got a server class xeon cpu it has pci express expansion i already said you can put a gpu in it can you run a virtual machine with pcie passthrough yes you absolutely can this model is a dual core four thread so that virtual machine that you're passing through the gpu it's not going to have a lot of horsepower but there are several models from qnap that include higher end processors higher in server class processors you can even get these these units with amd processors higher end amd processors because this is a xeon it does support error correcting memory this unit comes with eight gigabytes of memory but you can upgrade it all the way up to 128 gigabytes of memory and upgrading just like a computer you pop the side off and you're good to go in terms of other connectivity there are four two and a half gig lan ports and two usb 3 ports on the back i've also got an extra usb 3 port on the front so if you get like you know a 16 18 20 terabyte external usb hard drive and you know once a quarter you want to make an extra backup to an external hard drive and throw that in a bank vault somewhere which is a pretty good backup strategy you absolutely can do that all of our connectivity at the front here is sata you know just in case you're a crazy person and you're going to try to repurpose some of those discount serial attached scuzzy flash drives off ebay or something like that for your your home setup or your small business setup one reason that they might not have wanted to support uh u.2 nvme at the front is because hot plug only just now started working like we only just got the standard for nvme hot plug working like eight months ago and like working well i mean there's been at least 20 or 30 bios updates from dell to try to correct issues around nvme hot plug and mostly it seems like it's working at this point but you know with this if you do have an nvme that dies you'll have to shut the machine down and swap the nvme there's also something to be said for using nvme that is designed for high right endurance depending on how you're using it if you're using it what kind of cache you're using it for this thing is is an intelligent caching system you can also use it as zfs devices so if you're using it as a zfs device then obviously you want to use something that's high endurance you can use optane so something like optane will have just a ridiculous insane endurance but there are ssds that are built specifically for use in a nas appliance that have a high right endurance and there are also some enterprise grade ssds that you can get in an m.2 form factor that will be able to have an endurance up in the petabyte range you know ssds like the sk hynix p31 that i just reviewed you can only ride about 750 gigabytes to them a little less than a petabyte before the thing is completely worn out we'll talk about that in another video just in general because that's just something to be aware of when you're doing an ssd for cache generally you don't want to use a cheap ssd for caching and finally the last port is this weird little three and a half millimeter audio jack so this is a serial port which you use for debugging or whatever but there you go one thing that i like right away got room for an optional second blower fan and a second four pin fan header so it comes with the one installed which is going to give plenty of airflow but if this pci express by eight half height slot you're going to put something in that you know gets really really warm well i'm sure that qnap has a second fan accessory kit that you can order online but this is actually a pretty standard delta fan so you don't even have to get it from qnap you can just get a four pin blower fan and you're all good even though blower fans can be loud one thing i should mention about the the blower fan design here is that mostly it runs at a low rpm so this thing is quiet enough for you to sit it on your desk and not really be aware that it's in the room running all the time now let's talk for a second about zfs if you're gonna use zfs with this uh nas that's first of all a unique feature most nas don't do zfs i mean when you buy this a little bit of a premium price like i said but it's basically a zeon d i mean you're getting basically a full computer with a custom operating system so this is not really like a nas it's more like a small server really than a nas it's they do themselves a disservice calling it a nas zfs is a complicated you know combination file system volume management thing see what raid 6 is is you've got two drives worth of redundancy so if any one drive is failing the other drives can look at it and say okay we've got enough information to know what this should have been technically with raid 6 any two drives could die but if two drives die if the information is a little bit corrupt on the remaining drives you'd never know the only reason you know with raid 6 is because you get an extra drive of redundancy you know you get to really know what kind of failure modes raid or zfs guard against and zfs you know you've got raid z which is not great in the traditional sense raid z1 2 3 which is just the level of redundancy that you want but zfs also supports mirroring so with this because you have four drives you could do a mirrored stripe which would be insanely fast very low raid z overhead your total usable capacity would be two drives worth of storage or you could do raid z1 where you've got one drive worth of parity and three drives worth of capacity or you know some you could do raid z2 where you're in the same situation you get to do raid z3 which is actually not something i'd recommend with this enclosure you should just do a four-way mirror in that case instead of raid z3 with just one drive because it'll just be four copies on four physical disks if your stuff is that important then you've also got the two three and a half inch drive which you can use for caching or a separate log or l2 arc or some combination of devices like that but that's gonna have to be another video so that's enough about looking at the internals let's get some drives in this and take the software for a spin the best way to explain zfs really is to think about a single mechanical hard drive a single mechanical hard drive is what stores all of your information and if it dies it takes all the information with it it's basically an unrecoverable situation and a lot of weird things can happen right before it dies like it can lie to you it can be silently corrupting your information you don't know the easiest way to think about what you can do to guard against that is to have a mirror you've got two drives that are basically exactly identical and if the information gets corrupt on one and it dies you can read the information from the other one the problem is if you've got a you know a typical mass that has a mirrored configuration if both drives are working but one of them is lying there's no way to know that the information like which set of information is actually good because the system that manages storing the files the file system uh is separate from the thing that manages multiple physical disks they don't work together like the file system isn't even aware that it's running on a on a device that's not a real physical piece of hardware zfs combines the physical device management aspect of that along with the file system aspect of that and it stores extra checksum information so basically unless the drive returns exactly the right information zfs knows which drive contains the original correct information which is pretty awesome even if the drive is lying all over the place the mathematical chances of producing the exact checksum necessary to full zfs is very very small it's not going to happen and this platform supports error correcting memory which is important but not critical for zfs and all sorts of other fun cool zfs features so with zfs if you have two drives and you have a mirror zfs absolutely knows when one of the drives is working but lying and it will tell you hey this drive is having a lot of errors i'm going to take it offline you don't really get that with any other mirror type configuration you don't really get it all the way up until raid six and some but not all raid 6 implementations will do that all right now i've got everything set up in another room and we're ready to install this so it's just install.qnap.com and it'll take you to where you need to be which is on your sticker so that's for a cloud-based installation if you don't want to do a cloud-based installation or you're going to put it on a separate lan you totally can do that you can download q finder pro which is right here and you'll be able to do that don't mind me i'm just folding in the background one thing i do think deserves a quick mention is if you do use the offline configuration utility queue finder pro windows mac you of course ubuntu and the chrome web store nice now when you first access the qnap over the web with the interface whether you use the qnet pro or whatever tool you log into it you get a web interface you get block based snapshots to protect your data and it explains a lot of what you're working on um through the gui and so it sort of tells you a little bit about what's going on when you finally do get to the device setup wizard though it really refers to things as like raid one raid five it is actually talking about zfs and so with the three drives that i've added here you can set it up as a three-way mirror or raid z1 which is what i've opted for also virtualization getting the setup with vmware is pretty easy you just need the vsphere plug-in can't talk enough good things about virtualization using this as a backing store for vmware or hyper-v you can expose it as nfs or iscsi and you can still deal with you know block based snapshots or more advanced you know file share based snapshots using zfs built-in snapshotting facility but it's still a really high performance implementation because they're not really they're doing it the right way they're not really bolting together a bunch of different not quite compatible approaches for dealing with this and also you know with vmware listed here and an official vmware supported solution looks pretty good you can get a help screen for iscsi over rdma so rdma is nice because it's relatively low overhead it takes some of the networking overhead and shoves it into hardware so you get lower latency connections more throughput and for extra security you can lock this down with two factor so as long as the qnap can phone home you can enroll in two factors so that nobody can log on to the nas unless they have your two factor authentication method so you can use sms messages or google authenticator a couple other ways but it's nice to see that feature that's been a quick look at the qnap ts h686 but you know using it and the software set and all of the stuff that's running here under the hood i can't help but look up the stack of the ts 886 you got two more cores in your processor double the memory out of the box more three and a half inch drive bays you get the same two and a half inch drive bays in the same m.2 expansion capabilities it's a little beefier unit for only a couple of hundred dollars more i think that i would uh or less than a couple hundred dollars actually a new x even less than that i think if it's a choice between the 686 and the 886 and not knowing exactly where i'm going to go if it's going to be a device that i want to use for the next five years i think i'm going to go with the 886 over the 686. the 686 is not biotin i mean it's a it's a xeon it's zfs zfs is a as a huge win here zfs is a whole other thing that i could talk about endlessly but i don't think it's really accurate to call these nas devices this is more like you know a small server in a box and you combine that with the ability to run applications this can be your small business server solution with good backups and good off-site replication capabilities i mean zfs send is a robust zfs feature for doing replication that is a relatively low overhead fast replication option between nas devices it's a much better option than something that's based on rsync or something that's based on you know keeping track of changed blocks or whatever that's a feature that's built into zfs it's no extra work it's really awesome so i think i would use the ts h 686 as kind of an off-site appliance the 886 i think is going to be a better choice especially if you're running containers you know things like docker and maybe next cloud the you know the only office stuff so just you can run your cloud office stuff pretty much anything that is a mixed workload if you're just doing surveillance or one or two applications yeah the 686 is going to be fine i mean this is xeon d it's it's two cores four threads but you know qnap has even higher end solutions you can get more cpu horsepower more memory whatever it is that you're going to look at in terms of the other models it's just the price points between the 686 and the 886 are so close that spend a couple hundred extra bucks and get an extra year or two of usability i think with all of the possible upgrade paths that you have with the 886 but you know both of these are whisper quiet both of these would not be out of place on your desktop and it is nice to see you know a company like qnap that is providing commercial support for all of this open source stuff to a lot of companies that commercial support being able to pick up the phone having a qualified solution having a commercially qualified zfs solution that's worth the price of the chassis you can diy that there are options that you've got for doing more diy stuff but overall the package here and the you know the qnap experience i've got to admit is pretty nice they package the applications they made it point and click easy you don't have to be a gear head to deal with it i've had a pretty good time messing around with this and zfs i love zfs zfs really is an incredible piece of engineering i can't say enough nice things about zfs it's not perfect for all use cases but that is being worked on so i'm well this is level one i'm signing out and i'll see you later

Channel: Level1Techs

Views: 26,020

Keywords: technology, science, design, ux, computers, hardware, software, programming, level1, l1, level one

Id: U34BOPm_K9U

Length: 18min 23sec (1103 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 30 2020