Device Configuration


Unlike the previous group of tools the device configuration is concerned not with software setup but how the hardware in the NAS is configured. This includes the hard drives themselves, the RAID array and even USB printers that are attached to the NAS.


RAID Expansion

As the name suggests, the 409 Pro Turbo has the ability under certain circumstances to expand the capacity of its RAID array. What this means, is that by replacing smaller hard drives with larger ones you can make your already built array larger without loss of data.

QNAP has made this procedure relatively straightforward and painless. To set things in motion, you go into the administration page, select “device configuration” and then click on the “raid management tool”. Here you will see your RAID array(s) and when you select an array, a grayed out button will become clickable. This button is labeled “expand capacity”. When you select it you are brought to a new screen and are able to “replace” one the drives in the array. When you select one to be replaced you simply have to wait until in the description field it states “Please remove this drive”, when you do remove the right hard drive (this is where having the properly named hard drive caddy in the right slot comes in handy!) the NAS will beep at you twice and the description field will change to “Please insert the new drive”. Insert the new larger hard drive and when the NAS recognizes it the NAs will be beep and automatically start the recovery process.

When it is finished you simply redo all the above steps to replace all the small hard drives in the array with their larger replacement. When this is done you have to hit the “expand capacity button” on this page and it will give you a pop up asking you to confirm expansion of the array. Once you go through all the steps, it starts the process which can take up to TENS OF HOURS to complete. In our test of going from two 320GB hard drives to two 500gb hard drives, the total process took over 9 and a half hours to complete.

However, its pros out weigh its cons in that it is much safer than destroying your array and hoping your backup is not corrupt. Even though it is not mentioned in the QNAP help files it is strongly recommended that you have a known good backup of your data just in case a hard drive fails during this process. It would have been nice if 409 Pro Turbo was “smart” enough not to need your permission to expand the array if it discovers larger hard drives are now present, but in general this implementation is well thought out and is very user friendly.


RAID MIGRATION

QNAP’s engineers must have certainly realized that not everyone who purchases this unit will populate all 4 hard drive bays right away. To this end the 409 Pro Turbo will let you convert 1 JBOD hard drive into any RAID level, let you turn a RAID 1 array into RAID 5 or 6 and let a RAID 5 change into RAID 6. This versatility is exactly what people want and its execution is flawless. One simply has to insert the new hard drive(s), run the “raid management tool” and click the now un-grayed out “migrate” button and select what you would like to migrate the array to. It even tells you how much time is remaining before the new raid array is ready for use. During this time the NAS is still useable since you can read information from it but you will not be able to write or delete or in anyway modify any data on the NAS. Migrating from a RAID 1 500GB array to a RAID 5 three 500 GB hard drive array took a little over 7 hours, 15 minutes to complete.


Online spare hard drive

While this feature is puzzlingly only available for RAID 5 and not for RAID 1, it is a very handy feature none the less and was certainly welcome. For whatever reason, if you decide to only have 3 hard drives in a RAID 5 you can later add a fourth whose sole job is to automatically start the rebuilding process in case of a hard drive failure in one of the 3 hard drives. I have personally seen online hot spares save RAID 5 arrays from complete failure when one hard drive has failed.

When you have a failed hard drive in a RAID array the faster you replace that dead drive and allow the array to rebuild the better your chances of not losing all your data are. In a 4 bay unit this feature is more luxury and less of necessity than if you have 7 or 8 hard drives in the array, however, it’s a luxury most server administrators like to have. To some people RAID 6 + 4 bay hard drive NAS makes more sense than 3 drives + online spare. However, not everyone likes RAID 6 and its limitations since it is slower on writes than raid 5 (double parity vs. single parity) and having lots of choices is always a good thing in my opinion.


Print Server

The 409 Pro Turbo is able to handle network printing for 3 printers at one time. One simply has to plug in a USB capable printer to one of the 3 USB ports and the NAS will automatically set it up as a network printer. While the USB standard allows for daisy chaining of USB devices this “printer server” can only handle a maximum of three printers since this is a direct limitation of the USB controller chip that can handle only 4 data streams.

This is actually where a small pet peeve popped up. While this unit can handle 3 USB printers you need to either use a port replicator on one of them and plug two printers into that one port (and the third into the 2nd port on the back) or plug all three printers into all three ports and lose the USB copy abilities. QNAP should definitely have either given this unit a third USB port on the back or a second one on the front. I admit it is a small pet peeve but one should not have to pick or chose what features that they want to loose if they are to use the NAS to its fullest potential.

On the positive side, the network printing option works perfectly. Once we had set up a network printer on a computer we were able to send print jobs to the printer via the network. It is also great to see that the NAS acts as a print spooler for the printers thus enabling the full job to be quickly transmitted to the NAS and then allow the NAS to send it to the printer in non buffer overflowing chunks. Even though you can clear the printer spooler if a job does fail, we did not have to use this feature even once during testing.