QNAP TR-004 4 Bay Desktop NAS Expansion - Optional Use as a Direct-Attached Storage Device

It was time for me to upgrade as I'd filled by previous one of these. They work so well I just bought another five years later. Highly, highly recommended.

I bought this to replace a 15 year old TS-469L NAS that was having some transfer speed issues which I couldn't figure out. I realised I only ever connected to it from one computer so it made more sense to have it as a DAS for that computer so that I didn't have to mess around with endless Samba nonsense. Got it up and running quickly. Transferring from the computer's NVMe SSD to a WD60EFRX holds a constant 200MB/s on large file copies. Far far better than the TS-469L, which transferred at about 100MB/s internally, and seems more reliable. My only complaint is the locking mechanism absolutely sucks. It doesn't line up very well and has a tendency to spin round and round if you don't get it at the right angle. It's also only held in place with a push-fit circlip which is prone to popping off. Not too big of a deal for me as I don't use them. Note also that early versions of the TR-004 had a different JMS chipset to this one so older reviews may not reflect the current product.

This is sold as an expansion caddy for a QNAP NAS – but I'm using it as directly attached storage for my home server. It functions perfectly well as an external caddy, and provides a little more functionality than a standard 4-bay external caddy, at a price that's competitive with other reputable brands. The Interface is USB-C, so it's pretty straightforward to connect to a PC or Mac. There are dip-switches on the back that allows the user to select between RAID 0, RAID 1 and RAID 10 – or leave the caddy in JBOD mode, so your computer recognises individual disks inside. I was a little wary of this – assuming one false move with the dip-switches would wipe everything – but after moving the switches, you still have to press and hold a button before anything useful/calamitous can happen. The buttons and switches are nice and sturdy, so there's no danger of doing anything accidentally. There's a big 120mm fan on this, which means it turns a little slower and runs a little quieter than on units with an 80mm equivalent. It's doing a good job of keeping everything cool. Running with minimal load, the 4x12TB WD CMR drives I have inside are running at 35°C for slots one and four, and 37°C for two and three. Setup as RAID 0, when copying 32TB of data to the drive, temperatures peaked at 55°C (S.M.A.R.T status) is viewable through the QNAP external RAID Manager software that comes with the device. I've had not particular problems with that. It did have a crazy day of going off-line in 12-second bursts four or five times. Can't figure out what caused that, may have been nothing to do with the unit – but it's been up now for two months and, that day apart, has ran like a sewing machine. Speed-wise, it doesn't seem to be particularly quicker than using a software RAID system like SoftRAID. My files copied at around 7GB per minute, which is what I'd expect from a JBOD caddy – but the Mac Mini to which this is attached seems much more spritely with this Hardware RAID attached than it did running a software RAID. So, overall, I'm very happy with the purchase.

I bought this to expand my QNAP 4 bay NAS. It was easy to set up and I have 36 TB of HDD in there and runs perfectly alongside my 451+

TL;DR: If you're planning on adding this to a TrueNAS... well NAS, or using ZFS with another OS, there's a huge gotcha with this device. It doesn't expose the IDs of the disks themselves, instead they show up as "TR-004 DISK0[0-3]" which, apart from an ugly message from TrueNAS complaining about it, leaves you at risk of a corrupted pool if you move the disks around. Anyway, I bought this DAS hoping to use it as external storage for a NAS. I'm aiming for a cheap and low-power solution so have decided to go with an old laptop and external USB drives. This looked like a good solution - easy to access drive bays and low power consumption according to the spec sheet. Unfortunately, since purchase I have been feeling like perhaps I've made a mistake. First impressions: It's a small and quiet piece of kit, not much bigger than the 4 3.5" drives you would be putting inside. The Disk Trays are kind-of but not really tool-less. You can use without screwing the drives in but this is not recommended by the manual. Other than that, it's an unassuming black box with some LEDs on the front. The LEDs are bright enough without being too bright. In terms of power consumption, it is very frugal. About 1W without disks, and around 20W when fully populated with disk access. A general rule of thumb for HDDs is that they consume around 5W-10W, so there's very little overhead added by the device. This is the biggest selling point to me. Functionality: It's a USB disk enclosure, you put disks in and it makes them accessible over USB. There are a couple of modes which are controlled either by DIP-switches on the rear, or via the QNAP software. There is a "JBOD" mode, which is kind of the wrong name, which consists of each drive being used sequentially. If you put 4 500GB drives in there, and load it up with 900GB of data, you'll get 1 fully used drive and 1 drive that is 80% used, with the rest at 0%. I don't know what happens if a disk fails in this mode. You would normally assume JBOD to mean what they have termed "Individual" mode here, so let's get onto that. In Individual mode, you can access each disk as a completely separate drive, which allows you to utilise software RAID solutions (assuming they're ok with USB-attached storage). This is the mode I'm using as I want to utilise ZFS. The unfortunate issue here is that they are presented in order as "TR-004 Disk 0[0-3]". This means that drives are identified by the bay they're using, and not the drive itself, so if you move disks around this could confuse standard software RAID. TrueNAS makes a point of complaining about this, although you can ignore it. This is workable but not ideal - it might be a good idea to use a label maker to label which drive goes where. Note that you can determine the mapping of ID to disk if you use the SMART data of the drives. There are also other RAID modes, the standard ones you may expect when you think of RAID. e.g. RAID 0, where data is striped across disks, which is bad for reliability but good for speed. For this enclosure, you're constrained over USB 3 (and SATA II) so I wouldn't bother with this. In fact, in general, I would avoid the hardware RAID modes altogether and just use software RAID with Individual mode. It's 2024 and we have enough compute that software RAID doesn't use much in the way of resources. It's also a lot more flexible and means that you can easily take the drives out and move them to another system if this box dies. Other than that, as the bay has easy access to the drives, I wondered what would happen if I tried hotswapping them. In short, that was a bad idea. In long, it's using a cheap SATA expander and if a disk goes down, then they ALL go down. There's no hotswap here, and I assume that this will cause issues if you have a bad drive that disconnects of its own accord as well. If you do try to hotswap, it'll cause the whole thing to reboot. Definitely something to be aware of! In summary: It's a bit on the expensive side given the limitations. I'm sure it's more worthwhile if you're adding to a QNAP NAS, but if you're looking for TrueNAS/ZFS support, I would say keep searching.

No es un sistema barato, pero la calidad se paga. He probado otros de este tipo de marcas más baratas y no cesaban los problemas. En algunos el molesto auto-sleep, inestabilidades del chip usb o bugs del chip sata, en fin cansado de buscar soluciones a servicios de atención lentos e inexistentes me decidí a gastarme un poco más de dinero y comprar este QNAP TR-002. Velocidad de 10Gbps USB3.1 Gen2 y SATA 6Gbps (Curiosamente su hermano mayor el TR-004 solo es 5Gbps y sata 3Gbps). Estoy encantado, funciona de maravilla. muy estable y los discos están mas frescos que en otras cajas. Uso discos individuales, sin RAID porque no lo veo útil, yo duplico las copias manualmente y cambio los discos de una maquina a otra cuando lo necesito (cosa que no se puede hacer usando RAID). Tiene un diseño elegante y sólido que le da apariencia profesional, muy bonito para mi gusto. Leds discretos, no de esos que te hacen daño al mirarlos o ni se ven. Se puede usar sin software de ningún tipo, pero dispone de un softtare de QNAP para gestionarlo muy práctico y funcional. Hay una comunidad entera de usuarios de QNAP respaldando el sistema y hay continuas mejoras de software y firmware que con otras marcas de abandonan a tu suerte. Eso también se paga. He pagado un 50% más que por otras marcas pero no me arrepiento, me dá mucha tranquilidad este producto, no me importa pagar un poco más por la seguridad y la estabilidad extra. Mis datos tienen un valor muy superior al del extra que pago por algo de calidad. ¿Cuanto valen vuestros datos? Producto recomendado al 100%

Verkeerd gekeken dacht dat de nas ook een lan aansluiting had. Retour gestuurd

A NAS would have been overkill, and so would the price. A DAS suits my need perfectly. Direct access storage with redundancy is a great compromise, if you are not after network storage. That said, it gives you the option as an expansion storage to a nas later down the track if you choose to go that route as well.

Installed 2 12TB disks without problem. Using Raid 1 and so far so good. Will see if it runs without problem in the long run. Write and read speed good with USB 3.0 port.

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