A geek look into QNAP TS-453mini with 16GB RAM

       1396 words, 7 minutes

I bought a QNAP TS-453mini in order to replace the good old Synology DS409slim. Not that it doesn’t work. It’s just that the 4x 1TB disks are nearly full. I was desperately waiting for bigger 2.5" capacity but this doesn’t seem to happen. Also, since I moved into a new place, I planned to also reduce the number of plugged)in stuff. Hence, the fanless OpenBSD server would either go in the Cloud or… on the QNAP virtualization software.

After a bit of testing, I don’t like QTS 4.2 that much. Seem so complicated, compared to DSM. HybridDesk Station is also nice (Kodi displayed on TV using HDMI). But this looks like Android to me : a pile of Linux/GNU stuff mixed-up in a not so much friendly-way. So, as I’m a BSD-guy, I plan to replace QTS with some {Free,Net}BSD release. But before that, I wanted to have an inside look at the original system as I had difficulties finding informations on the Internet.

The first thing to advertise is than TS-453mini does support 16GB of RAM ! Yes ‘mam. In my case, I used two CRUCIAL-CT102464BF160B (SO-DIMM DDR3 Crucial, 8 Go, 1600 MHz, CAS 11). QTS works well and recognizes the whole set of memory.

Here’s the dmidecode output QNAP TS-453mini dmidecode

Installing Windows, you can get the following informations :

The other thing I was wondering is what RAID system that box used. My installation has 1 SSD drive and 3 SATA drives. The original idea was to have virtual machines on the SSD and all the data on the SATA drives. The RAID thing is done via Software RAID (mdadm):

# cat /proc/mdstat 
Personalities : [linear] [raid0] [raid1] [raid10] [raid6] [raid5] [raid4] [multipath] 
md2 : active raid5 sdc3[2] sdb3[0] sda3[1]
      11701135232 blocks super 1.0 level 5, 64k chunk, algorithm 2 [3/3] [UUU]
      
md1 : active raid1 sdd3[0]
      966807616 blocks super 1.0 [1/1] [U]
      
md256 : active raid1 sdc2[3](S) sda2[2](S) sdb2[1] sdd2[0]
      530112 blocks super 1.0 [2/2] [UU]
      bitmap: 0/1 pages [0KB], 65536KB chunk

md13 : active raid1 sdc4[24] sdd4[0] sda4[3] sdb4[2]
      458880 blocks super 1.0 [24/4] [UUUU____________________]
      bitmap: 1/1 pages [4KB], 65536KB chunk

md9 : active raid1 sdc1[24] sdd1[0] sda1[3] sdb1[2]
      530048 blocks super 1.0 [24/4] [UUUU____________________]
      bitmap: 1/1 pages [4KB], 65536KB chunk

# mount | grep md
/dev/md9 on /mnt/HDA_ROOT type ext3 (rw,data=ordered)
/dev/md13 on /mnt/ext type ext3 (rw,data=ordered)

# for n in 1 2 9 13 256; do mdadm --detail /dev/md$n; echo ''; done
/dev/md1:
        Version : 1.0
  Creation Time : Tue Mar 22 23:35:47 2016
     Raid Level : raid1
     Array Size : 966807616 (922.02 GiB 990.01 GB)
  Used Dev Size : 966807616 (922.02 GiB 990.01 GB)
   Raid Devices : 1
  Total Devices : 1
    Persistence : Superblock is persistent

    Update Time : Fri Apr  8 22:47:00 2016
          State : clean 
 Active Devices : 1
Working Devices : 1
 Failed Devices : 0
  Spare Devices : 0

           Name : 1
           UUID : e0e6785f:3ef7a9e8:85a64565:d62167c0
         Events : 4

    Number   Major   Minor   RaidDevice State
       0       8       51        0      active sync   /dev/sdd3

/dev/md2:
        Version : 1.0
  Creation Time : Thu Mar 24 20:47:59 2016
     Raid Level : raid5
     Array Size : 11701135232 (11159.07 GiB 11981.96 GB)
  Used Dev Size : 5850567616 (5579.54 GiB 5990.98 GB)
   Raid Devices : 3
  Total Devices : 3
    Persistence : Superblock is persistent

    Update Time : Fri Apr  8 22:28:21 2016
          State : clean 
 Active Devices : 3
Working Devices : 3
 Failed Devices : 0
  Spare Devices : 0

         Layout : left-symmetric
     Chunk Size : 64K

           Name : 2
           UUID : 41660e5e:53d54f9b:c5af0bf8:59a167ce
         Events : 12528

    Number   Major   Minor   RaidDevice State
       0       8       19        0      active sync   /dev/sdb3
       1       8        3        1      active sync   /dev/sda3
       2       8       35        2      active sync   /dev/sdc3

/dev/md9:
        Version : 1.0
  Creation Time : Tue Mar 22 19:25:55 2016
     Raid Level : raid1
     Array Size : 530048 (517.71 MiB 542.77 MB)
  Used Dev Size : 530048 (517.71 MiB 542.77 MB)
   Raid Devices : 24
  Total Devices : 4
    Persistence : Superblock is persistent

  Intent Bitmap : Internal

    Update Time : Fri Apr  8 22:44:37 2016
          State : active, degraded 
 Active Devices : 4
Working Devices : 4
 Failed Devices : 0
  Spare Devices : 0

           Name : 9
           UUID : 971e961f:b07ad03e:3e8c6160:be7e2069
         Events : 11549

    Number   Major   Minor   RaidDevice State
       0       8       49        0      active sync   /dev/sdd1
      24       8       33        1      active sync   /dev/sdc1
       2       8       17        2      active sync   /dev/sdb1
       3       8        1        3      active sync   /dev/sda1
       8       0        0        8      removed
      10       0        0       10      removed
      12       0        0       12      removed
      14       0        0       14      removed
      16       0        0       16      removed
      18       0        0       18      removed
      20       0        0       20      removed
      22       0        0       22      removed
      24       0        0       24      removed
      26       0        0       26      removed
      28       0        0       28      removed
      30       0        0       30      removed
      32       0        0       32      removed
      34       0        0       34      removed
      36       0        0       36      removed
      38       0        0       38      removed
      40       0        0       40      removed
      42       0        0       42      removed
      44       0        0       44      removed
      46       0        0       46      removed

/dev/md13:
        Version : 1.0
  Creation Time : Tue Mar 22 19:26:03 2016
     Raid Level : raid1
     Array Size : 458880 (448.20 MiB 469.89 MB)
  Used Dev Size : 458880 (448.20 MiB 469.89 MB)
   Raid Devices : 24
  Total Devices : 4
    Persistence : Superblock is persistent

  Intent Bitmap : Internal

    Update Time : Fri Apr  8 22:20:53 2016
          State : active, degraded 
 Active Devices : 4
Working Devices : 4
 Failed Devices : 0
  Spare Devices : 0

           Name : 13
           UUID : cf861591:1f054d49:d23bfa99:2eba3539
         Events : 1837

    Number   Major   Minor   RaidDevice State
       0       8       52        0      active sync   /dev/sdd4
      24       8       36        1      active sync   /dev/sdc4
       2       8       20        2      active sync   /dev/sdb4
       3       8        4        3      active sync   /dev/sda4
       8       0        0        8      removed
      10       0        0       10      removed
      12       0        0       12      removed
      14       0        0       14      removed
      16       0        0       16      removed
      18       0        0       18      removed
      20       0        0       20      removed
      22       0        0       22      removed
      24       0        0       24      removed
      26       0        0       26      removed
      28       0        0       28      removed
      30       0        0       30      removed
      32       0        0       32      removed
      34       0        0       34      removed
      36       0        0       36      removed
      38       0        0       38      removed
      40       0        0       40      removed
      42       0        0       42      removed
      44       0        0       44      removed
      46       0        0       46      removed

/dev/md256:
        Version : 1.0
  Creation Time : Mon Apr  4 23:12:39 2016
     Raid Level : raid1
     Array Size : 530112 (517.77 MiB 542.83 MB)
  Used Dev Size : 530112 (517.77 MiB 542.83 MB)
   Raid Devices : 2
  Total Devices : 4
    Persistence : Superblock is persistent

  Intent Bitmap : Internal

    Update Time : Tue Apr  5 00:25:15 2016
          State : active 
 Active Devices : 2
Working Devices : 4
 Failed Devices : 0
  Spare Devices : 2

           Name : 256
           UUID : ada991cf:ead39d2a:cbe94fef:b8ba1166
         Events : 26

    Number   Major   Minor   RaidDevice State
       0       8       50        0      active sync   /dev/sdd2
       1       8       18        1      active sync   /dev/sdb2

       2       8        2        -      spare   /dev/sda2
       3       8       34        -      spare   /dev/sdc2

On top of it comes the Logical Volume Manager (LVM)

# pvdisplay
  --- Physical volume ---
  PV Name               /dev/drbd2
  VG Name               vg2
  PV Size               10.90 TiB / not usable 1.84 MiB
  Allocatable           yes (but full)
  PE Size               4.00 MiB
  Total PE              2856721
  Free PE               0
  Allocated PE          2856721
  PV UUID               lk5SJm-zi02-NNUR-jDij-62d4-1gvf-1XF1ot
   
  --- Physical volume ---
  PV Name               /dev/drbd1
  VG Name               vg1
  PV Size               922.02 GiB / not usable 3.53 MiB
  Allocatable           yes (but full)
  PE Size               4.00 MiB
  Total PE              236036
  Free PE               0
  Allocated PE          236036
  PV UUID               3yOXXb-WBTJ-rUDO-0UCb-ZY3t-o4YI-GkOA9L

Finally, I was concerned by Virtualization. QTS uses KVM/qemu. Not that weird :)

# lsmod | grep kvm
kvm_intel 125044 4 - Live 0xffffffffa05d8000
kvm 263729 1 kvm_intel, Live 0xffffffffa0583000

# ps -aef | grep KVM
  779 admin    2111076 S   /KVM/opt/bin/qemu-system-x86_64 -name Windows -S -machine pc-1.3,accel=kvm,usb=off -m 2048 -realtime mlo
23422 admin     36116 S   python /KVM/opt/htdocs/webvirtmgr/lib/TaskDaemon.py 
23442 admin      7456 S   /KVM/opt/sbin/libvirtd -d -l 
23560 admin     27184 S   /KVM/opt/bin/python /KVM/opt/htdocs/webvirtmgr/vm/vm_watcher start 
23611 admin      3568 S   /KVM/opt/bin/httpd -k start 
23615 httpdusr   2012 S   /KVM/opt/bin/httpd -k start 
23616 httpdusr  55544 S   /KVM/opt/bin/httpd -k start 
23806 admin     30956 S   /KVM/opt/bin/python /KVM/opt/htdocs/webvirtmgr/task/daemon start 
23809 admin     29440 S   /KVM/opt/bin/python /KVM/opt/htdocs/webvirtmgr/task/daemon start 
23819 admin     34220 S   python /KVM/opt/htdocs/webvirtmgr/noVNC/utils/websockify.py --cert=/KVM/opt/conf/server.crt --target-conf
24040 admin      7652 S   python /KVM/opt/htdocs/webvirtmgr/lib/pyinotify.py -e IN_CLOSE_WRITE -c /tmp/qvminotify.sh /tmp/qvminotif
25962 httpdusr   6312 S   /KVM/opt/bin/httpd -k start