Configuring the Storage Pool

When it comes to creating a storage pool, you can tell that QNAP is in a different league compared to the new entrants in the NAS market space, as even a consumer model like the TS-432X comes with more options than any sane consumer is ever going to need. Sure, some of these options are going to be useful for small businesses, which the TS-432X also targets, but even a small business would need a lot of in-house know-how when it comes to some of the features on offer.


As always, we tested the TS-432X with the standard RAID modes, starting the testing with RAID-5. A neat feature that QNAP has is that you can reserve space for snapshots, as well as get alerts as the NAS admin when the drives start to get close to full.


Nothing out of the ordinary here, just the typical warnings to make sure you don't wipe drives with data on them and then a little wait for the storage pool to be created.


Next up you have to create a storage volume, which is the time-consuming part. We picked the traditional configuration for our testing, to avoid any kind of issues an on-demand space could cause. The 8.5 TB volume took close to eight hours to finish, but you can start using the NAS straight away, albeit at a reduced performance and increased time for the volume creation to finish, so we don't recommend it.

Disk Configuration

Below is the output from the fdisk -l command on Linux, which shows the disk configuration. Note that QNAP doesn't include the lsblk command in its custom OS, which is what we've used in the past to list things.

Disk /dev/sda: 4000.7 GB, 4000787030016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 486401 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 1 267350 2147483647+ ee EFI GPT

Disk /dev/sdb: 4000.7 GB, 4000787030016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 486401 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdb1 1 267350 2147483647+ ee EFI GPT

Disk /dev/sdc: 4000.7 GB, 4000787030016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 486401 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdc1 1 267350 2147483647+ ee EFI GPT

Disk /dev/sdd: 4000.7 GB, 4000787030016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 486401 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdd1 1 267350 2147483647+ ee EFI GPT

Disk /dev/md9: 542 MB, 542769152 bytes
2 heads, 4 sectors/track, 132512 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 8 * 512 = 4096 bytes

Disk /dev/md9 doesn't contain a valid partition table

Disk /dev/md13: 469 MB, 469893120 bytes
2 heads, 4 sectors/track, 114720 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 8 * 512 = 4096 bytes

Disk /dev/md13 doesn't contain a valid partition table