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Installing FreeNAS on my QNAP TS-459

by humaid on 6/15/20, 4:25 PM with 52 comments

  • by linsomniac on 6/15/20, 8:17 PM

    RAID drive fails, "I regretted installing ClamAV".

    Don't regret it! It allowed you to find a drive failure before a second drive failed, and allowed you to recover your data while it was still recoverable! This is a good thing!

    Archival data is a tricky problem. If you don't regularly read it, you may find that when you do need to read it, that the sector has suffered some bit rot. What's one of the most likely cases where you have to read archived data? When a hard drive fails and RAID is doing a rebuild...

    So, by all means, run a ClamAV scan! Or better yet, run a ZFS scrub monthly or so. I've been a huge fan of ZFS for my archive data, mostly historic photos and Google takeout data now, because it can detect silent corruption and can do scrubs to verify and repair any hard drives sectors that have problems.

  • by nicolaslem on 6/15/20, 5:40 PM

    I was surprised that there are very few PC cases made for small NAS. So this solution of buying a consumer product and installing FreeNAS on it makes sense.

  • by ksec on 6/15/20, 6:37 PM

    Qnap actually has a new OS called Hero Edition that uses ZFS by default, coming in Q3.

    https://www.qnap.com/quts-hero/en/

  • by dghughes on 6/15/20, 6:28 PM

    At college I built a Linux cluster for a project and for the SAN/NAS I used XigmasNAS. It's so much smaller and less bloated than FreeNAS has become.

    I had trouble configuring parts of the cluster but overall XigmaNAS worked well.

  • by aquaticsunset on 6/15/20, 10:08 PM

    This is timely!

    I have a QNAP TS-251 (two drive bay model) that has been collecting dust for roughly two and a half years. Somebody was able to install a ransomware program on it, I suspect using the QSnatch[1] vulnerability. I triple pass zeroed the system storage and mothballed it.

    Two months ago decided I wanted to do something with this machine again, so I bought two new Seagate IronWolf drives and installed FreeNAS (it can boot to and run from the USB 3.0 port on the back).

    Is it the perfect hardware for FreeNAS? Nope - barely meets the minimum 8GB RAM requirements. But it's running as a media backup and Plex server, and doing a fantastic job at it. When I outgrow this hardware I'll certainly replace it with something I can also install FreeNAS on - consider me a happy convert.

    [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/qnap/comments/dvh7n2/qsnatch_malwar...

  • by rufius on 6/15/20, 6:36 PM

    Interesting.

    I have a TVS-471 that I run the default QNAP OS on. That said, I only use it for typical NAS workloads like:

    - serving media - file storage - device backup - off-site backup

    I recently started using the Hybrid Backup Station app and have been pretty impressed. I’ve got three jobs - Multimedia, Photos, and Archive backup. They all go to BackBlaze B2 on slightly different schedules.

    Been really pleased with it. That said, I do find the UI a little clunky so I can see why the author chose an alternative for their use case.

    I’ve got a cheap $150 NUC I use for more typical *nix server stuff that sits next to the NAS. It mostly runs an unbound DNS Forwarder for now but I plan to expand its usage further.

  • by trengrj on 6/16/20, 9:50 AM

    Rather than waste time using one of the proprietary NAS systems like QNAP and Synology, why not support a system that runs and supports unmodified Linux and publishes full schematics like the upcoming Kobol64 https://kobol.io/?

  • by ianlevesque on 6/15/20, 6:06 PM

    Is that typical for QNAP to allow alternative OS installs? I know with Synology you cannot.