QNAP TR-004 Setup
In our QNAP TR-002 review, we showed how the drives present themselves and it was the same both connecting the TR-004 to a PC as well as to a QNAP NAS. The biggest difference was having twice as many drives. Since this is largely the same, we wanted to show something else we ran into. First, here is the unit with the dries installed.
One item we found was that the drives internally are only connected via 3Gbps links, not 6Gbps links.
The other thing you might notice is that while the two Seagate Exos X22 20TB super cheap renews folks in the STH forums are talking about worked fine, the two WD Gold 20TB drives are showing as red and failed. What triggered this was when we made the big mistake: updating firmware.
We clicked the box even though it said that the latest firmware the auto-updater (and manually looking on the website) found was 1.0.4, and which was older than the no-version current firmware. We figured it would be a good idea to update to the latest one we could find, and that was a terrible idea. The WD Gold 20TB drives instantly went into a failed state while the Seagate drives were fine. Needless to say, that is a terrible experience.
If you want to learn more about setting RAID levels, we showed how one can use the switches or the QNAP External RAID Manager to connect this to a PC or Mac in the How to Setup RAID on QNAP USB RAID Enclosure.
Next, let us get to the performance.
Just a quick note
I use these machines as a DAS
The usb on the 4 bay is only Gen 1 – 5Gbps
The 2 bay has the Gen 2 – 10 Gbps
I do personally appreciate the possibility of using DIP switches to set things up, as it means I don’t necessarily need to use proprietary drivers to change the RAID levels. Especially if I were ever to use it with a system that doesn’t have those drivers available.
That remark about not updating the firmware, I understood that. I updated the firmware on their other usb-attached enclosure with 2 bays and that was a mistake. Ended up having to RMA it back to QNAP.
I just got one of these, no usb light and windows doesn’t think anything is connected, drives spin up and have green lights. Drives do have power disable pin.
Thanks for this helpful review. I want to clarify something. I have one of these coming and want to run it as RAID 5. You mentioned that hardware RAID 5 is slow because the unit is dram-less. Did you test that? If you were going to run the unit as RAID 5 you would use the software mode? Thanks again!
QNAP TR-004 Firmware 1.2.0 2022-11-01
[Fixed Issues]
– Fixed an issue where the TVS-882ST3 NAS could not detect the TR-004 expansion unit if the expansion unit had 20 TB Western Digital WD201FKGX-68BKJN0 HDDs installed in all four slots.
You should be able to do this now.