A few questions before I purchase

[sfx2000]

Well I guess it's...................................................................................... "All dressed up and nowhere to go"??????? Well the box is nice

View attachment 3970

Kinda like Christmas Morning and somebody forgot to pick up batteries

 

[sfx2000]

ASUS router has great firmware + 3-4 open source firmware options as well (I flip back and forth between Tomato & Merlin firmware)

You should not have to depend on a 3rd party firmware to basically make things work...

<rant mode>

Actually, ASUS does some nice HW, prone to overheating perhaps, and their SW/Firmware is crap - that's why the 3rd parties have stepped up - RMerlin has done a heroes job with his stuff, and Padovan as well - and when you look at the ASUS Subforum here, the RT86U is one of their better devices, and it's broken out of the box...

Let's not start talking about the 87U, which is a trail of broken rainbows and unicorn tears there... esp. in 5GHz these days... they'll get it fixed someday perhaps, as the third parties don't have access to the GPL drop from Quantenna...

And ASUS support - well, there is a reason why folks have congregated over here, as their support forums are basically blackholes...

ASUS - They really do count on community support and 3rd parties to make their HW work...

Been there, done that, and the gear is in the eWaste bin...​

</rant mode>

Yeah, I have a beef with them...

 

[sfx2000]

A curious story... two weeks ago, on a Sunday, I ordered from Amazon a replacement motor for a bathroom vent fan. It was delivered the next day, Monday. No extra shipping charges.

Happens sometimes... I've been surprised both ways... overnight when paying for standard, and paying a bit more and being delayed... even from Amazon directly... I suppose it depends on which warehouse it's coming from, and with Amazon directly, it could be anywhere...

They're a bit more consistent these days on surprising the customer by sending things earlier than expected.

 

[sfx2000]

Well I guess it's...................................................................................... "All dressed up and nowhere to go"??????? Well the box is nice

View attachment 3970

And I bet when they shipped it, they said in their shipping email - Signature Required - they did on my TS-453Pro - and I stayed home - missed the UPS guy, and it was on the doorstep...

Anyways... in your case, I suppose it's like a RedBull/Nyquil Smoothie... all wound up and no place to go...

Go over to BestBuy/Fry's/Anonymous BigBox, and pick up a matching drive - NAS's like more than one drive for the initial setup...

sfx

 

[Wafflebird]

Oh if only I could populate all 4 bays straight away, at the moment I am going to end up with a really expensive 6TB drive so to speak. I guess I am waaayyyyyyy behind the times as I have just put KODI on the pc.............. um WOW is all I can say, feel like I have been in a secluded cave. Cant wait to get the 471 set up on that. If you guys have some insight on this I would really appreciate it. Based on the regular delivery schedule the drive will not be here till late tomorrow so it may be Saturday before I get it booted up.

SFX,

Like you I was stationed at home to ensure delivery as Amazon said signature required, it was dropped off and not a peep, I knew the driver was here only because of the dogs, there was no knock or no ringing of the doorbell??

 

[sfx2000]

Oh if only I could populate all 4 bays straight away, at the moment I am going to end up with a really expensive 6TB drive so to speak.

Meh... I've got four 3TB Seagate Enterprise NAS drives spinning up on my TS453Pro...

RAID10 so that's 6TB of storage... talk about cost...

 

[stevech]

What does one do with ONE 6TB drive? It's like having one shoe.
(in terms of backup, not RAID).

 

[Wafflebird]

stevech,
Aqusition cost was high (for me anyway), one drive will get me started and allow me to learn the os until I can get two more. Then I can go to RAID 5. This is what I could do at the moment from a $ stance. Not the absolute best but a start, your comment however is spot on and understood.

 

[Trexx]

You should not have to depend on a 3rd party firmware to basically make things work...

<rant mode>

Actually, ASUS does some nice HW, prone to overheating perhaps, and their SW/Firmware is crap - that's why the 3rd parties have stepped up - RMerlin has done a heroes job with his stuff, and Padovan as well - and when you look at the ASUS Subforum here, the RT86U is one of their better devices, and it's broken out of the box...

Let's not start talking about the 87U, which is a trail of broken rainbows and unicorn tears there... esp. in 5GHz these days... they'll get it fixed someday perhaps, as the third parties don't have access to the GPL drop from Quantenna...

And ASUS support - well, there is a reason why folks have congregated over here, as their support forums are basically blackholes...

ASUS - They really do count on community support and 3rd parties to make their HW work...

Been there, done that, and the gear is in the eWaste bin...​

</rant mode>

Yeah, I have a beef with them...

Actually I have never seen a home consumer router that I thought had "GREAT" firmware or all the features that I would like. They dumb them down for the masses. And at least with Asus and the various similar chipset built Routers, you have the option to fix the vendors issues with 3rd party firmware. Other brands you are stuck with the vendors insecure firmware and hope/pray the decide to bless you with "fixes".

I never count on any vendors support for home routers. I have been doing this too long to believe in unicorns

 

[htismaqe]

stevech,
Aqusition cost was high (for me anyway), one drive will get me started and allow me to learn the os until I can get two more. Then I can go to RAID 5. This is what I could do at the moment from a $ stance. Not the absolute best but a start, your comment however is spot on and understood.

If you plan on storing anything of value on your NAS, make your next purchase is a single drive USB or eSATA enclosure and make external backups of your NAS. That's FAR more important in the grand scheme of things than enabling RAID.

 

[stevech]

If you plan on storing anything of value on your NAS, make your next purchase is a single drive USB or eSATA enclosure and make external backups of your NAS. That's FAR more important in the grand scheme of things than enabling RAID.

Yes. Too late now, but I'd have avoided a bleeding-edge 6TB gen 1. Maybe 2x 4TB. And RAID5 - beware. It is not a backup. It sometimes helps if there's a drive failure. Fewer drives (e.g. volumes instead of RAID) = fewer failures. Human error is the most likely cause of data loss.

 

[Wafflebird]

OK I got the drive took some pics (not the best in my haste to get it going) as it was all coming out. Put the HDD in plugged it all in and pushed the power button ....................and ................heart failure, would not come on.

Take a deep breath and check everything,................................................................................................... turns out the system will work much better if you actually plug the power cord ALL THE WAY IN when you install it into the back of the NAS. Once this was done I am am up and through the set up. I enabled all three file transfer types although I will most likely only be using Windows and iPad and android tablets on it. If you think I should take the third for unix etc. off let me know as I should be able to do this later.

I have read numerous times that you should do the bad block scan and am thus doing this now, looks like it is going to take a while but I think it prudent to deal with this issue now as opposed to a potential problem later, I would rather know if a problem exists now.

Just went back to check on the progress and the little circle is not spinning and it is stuck on 1 percent. I opened up another Chrome tab to do this post but I would not think this would cause a problem???????????????????????????

Well wait a minute I got a message saying it (471) could not be found, opened up the qfinder and it is still at chugging away at 3%. I have had suspicions of my 16 port switch bugging out lately and wonder if this is indeed the case. Looks like this bad block sector scan will take a while.................................................................................. 5% now.

Just wanted to give you guys an update and state a couple of surprises along the way.

First is how small the NAS is, you can see photos and look at measurements but when I took it out of the box I was still surprised at the size, or lack there of.
Second they sent not one, not two, not three but 4, Four Ethernet cables with this thing!!!!!!!!
Third the weight of this thing without the drives. You know there are some quality components in this device (assuming they did not fill it with rocks). This thing with 4 HDD's in it will be a chunk to lift.

6%

 

[sfx2000]

Based on the regular delivery schedule the drive will not be here till late tomorrow so it may be Saturday before I get it booted up.

Guessing by the lack of posts, the drive must have showed up, so your Friday evening is pretty much occupied, lol...

 

[Wafflebird]

My post was/is still waiting for approval from 1.5 hours ago

 

[Wafflebird]

OK good morning, I have a couple of questions. I did the bad block scan last night and it finished. I have the 6TB drive in there but when I look at the system information I get conflicting reports. When looking at the system health I see that 212 MB are used but it only shows 2.69 TB available? When I look at the storage manager I see Storage pool 1 listed at 5.45 TB but it shows basically 50% of it used. So basically it is split up into half based on what I see. I am thinking I should have 5.45 TB of space. Does this have to do with how I set it up by allowing all 3 file transfer types? Looking at the system status and Disk usage it says available 2.69 TB of 2.69 TB?

Also how many of you enable the Antivirus on your machines, the one that comes standard with it?

I will have more questions as I go along but really scratching my head on the amount of storage available.

After installation of several programs my ram usage is up to around 37%. I am thinking of asking for the Crucial 16 Big ram kit for Fathers day, any thoughts on this?

Temps after being in the entertainment center (in a separate area as indicated earlier not in with all the rest of the stuff, good ventilation and no noticeable heat around the unit after all night running) all night and running are @ 114 each system and HDD, processor is at 127 F.

 

[sfx2000]

I have read numerous times that you should do the bad block scan and am thus doing this now, looks like it is going to take a while but I think it prudent to deal with this issue now as opposed to a potential problem later, I would rather know if a problem exists now.

Probably not needed - normally what I do when commissioning a new drive is format it, check the SMART stats, and let it soak for a couple of days, and check SMART stats again - if all looks good, I put the drive into use - drives will either fail out of the box, within a couple of days, or they'll run thru to the end of their practical lifespan - which these days is about 3 years...

The format and partitioning of the drives will find and map out any and all bad blocks behind the scenes.

Also, you can safely turn off the NFS file server, as you mentioned, you're Windows as a primary.. might consider turning off AFP as well, as one only needs that if you've got Macs on your network, and only then if you want to use the TimeMachine functionality - Linux and Mac all spec SMB/CIFS if that is a concern.

 

[htismaqe]

There's still ton of issues with SMB and OS X. I can't write images of my Time Machine drive to the NAS using SMB - it gets to 99% and then tells me there's not enough space to write the image. I have over 2TB of storage free and it works fine with AFP.

I only use SMB from my Mac as a last resort. AFP works much better. Plus it properly preserves metadata and resource forks without having to write extra hidden files.

 

[sfx2000]

There's still ton of issues with SMB and OS X. I can't write images of my Time Machine drive to the NAS using SMB - it gets to 99% and then tells me there's not enough space to write the image. I have over 2TB of storage free and it works fine with AFP.

I only use SMB from my Mac as a last resort. AFP works much better. Plus it properly preserves metadata and resource forks without having to write extra hidden files.

I do run AFP on my Turbo, even though I do not use it as a TimeMachine host... but again, I'm very cross platform with Win/Lin/Mac - I don't run the NFS service on the QNAP, as I tend to keep my linux boxen as little silos of awesomeness all on their own...

OP is Windows centric - so he doesn't need the AFP/NFS overhead...

 

[sfx2000]

I can't write images of my Time Machine drive to the NAS using SMB

TimeMachine has never been officially supported by Apple on SMB fwiw - doing a SparseImage there, it's asking for problems - TimeMachine can be hosted on AFP...

 

[sfx2000]

I'm in the camp that NAS boxes don't go in TV room. Use the LAN!

Something I just picked up today - Baytrail-T Win8.1 hockey puck - runs Kodi/XBMC client very nicely... 160 bucks at the local Fry's...

Fanless, 2W power usage, and 1080P with h264 acceleration - nifty little box... bit bigger than an Apple TV2/3 - HDMI included... likely also wins on the SPAF - Spouse/Partner Approval Factor as long as not too many wires are attached to it...

Minix Neo Z64