unRAID on QNAP TS-451

[Preed88]

8 minutes ago, Nicodem said:

All works good. It was cable connection issue.

Beside the fact that front screen is always on with Booting... info - works way better then any QNAP firmware.

I am now moving also to Unraid with my 453D model. Qnap just sucks with firmware part - overbloated.

This is great to hear. I'll be moving my TS-659+ to Unraid now..much appreciated for the info!

[doubleopinter]

Hi guys! I'm kind of stoked that I found these posts. I have a 451+ that was just about to replace with an Asustor but this seems like a great idea, better than spending money. I upgraded mine to 8GB ages ago. I just tried installing the latest QNAP firmware (v5.0) and it messes everything up, system doesn't hold DNS so nothing works. It's a total and complete mess and I'm so sick of their QTS. Someone in here had a 451+, how's that working?

[ddos]

On 8/17/2021 at 1:54 AM, Preed88 said:

I am going to do this with my ts-659 PRO and was wondering if you ever resolved this issue?

 

Hey

 

I just got my hands on a ts-659 pro and am also wanting to install unraid 

 

QTS for this device is useless

 

Did you manage to install unraid on your 659pro?

 

Any issues that I should be aware of?

 

Did you need to upgrade your ram?

[something fishy]

I bought an old QNAP 1079 Pro on ebay

https://www.qnap.com/en-uk/product/ts-1079 pro

for the express purpose of running unraid. It was the cheapest way that I could get a compact 10 bay hotswap enclosure. Its serving well and appears to have great cooling. I doubt that I could have built better for twice the second hand price I paid. This is an i3 machine and mine came with 16Gb of RAM. It has 2x onboard NICs and mine came with an extra dual NIC card (removed see below).

 

A few observations

- I had to load the QNAP OS and switch off "environmental energy management" (or something like that) to enable boot on power restore (for a UPS). The setting is not exposed in the BIOS. Power cycle it a few times to make sure its working - sometimes the setting did not stick for me. This was maybe a flat cmos battery

- To change the cmos battery requires the mainboard being removed. This needs six screws removing (4x ordinary and both the locking screws on the vga port) the SATA backplane removing (do this without disks present!) and pretty much all mainboard cables pulling. It's not hard but it is very fiddly and the chassis edges are sharp.

- I couldn't get the front LED working either, I unplugged it.

- CPU cooling looked marginal to me (slowing the case fans down caused a kernel panic before HDD temps became a problem). I wedged a noctua fan on top of the CPU heatsink (there are spare fan headers). Switch the fan control for the case fans to fixed speed in the BIOS and Dynamix fan control plugin seems to work.

- I stuck a cheap sata card into the spare pcie slot (designed for a second NIC card) for a SSD cache drive. A 2.5 inch HDD/SSD can sit loose above the drive bay (where the PSU lives). You will need a special card backplate (one came with the NAS in my case) as standard low profile backplates don't work. This done all ten drive bays are free for the array.

- I'm only using one of its two onboard NICs but as far as I can tell unraid is perfectly happy in this hardware and I can see no reason why it wouldn't work

- Started off by pulling the QNAP DOM module. But there is a second on board USB header (presumably for a redundant DOM?) and I fashioned a short flying lead so that my unraid flash drive is stored internally (attached to the base of the case behind the drive bay). Just select the correct boot order in the BIOS.

- It seems to reboot once during a start up sequence for reasons I don't understand. But I think using the QNAP OS it does this several times. The unraid webui is available about 90 seconds after boot which is 3-4 minutes quicker than the QNAP web UI. 

- Its as quiet as the N54L HP microserver that preceded it. The HDDs seem happier spinning down than they did in the microserver.

 

The unraid system info reports the NAS as:

 

Model: N/A

M/B: ICP/iEi QA61 Version V1.0 - s/n: To be filled by O.E.M.

BIOS: American Megatrends Inc. Version 4.6.4. Dated: 01/19/2012

CPU: Intel® Core™ i3-2120 CPU @ 3.30GHz

HVM: Not Available

IOMMU: Not Available

Cache: 128 KiB, 512 KiB, 3 MB

Memory: 16 GiB DDR3 Multi-bit ECC (max. installable capacity 32 GiB)

Network: eth0: 1000 Mbps, full duplex, mtu 1500
 eth1: interface down

Kernel: Linux 5.10.28-Unraid x86_64

OpenSSL: 1.1.1j

Uptime: 0 days, 04:09:09