I have about 10TB of music (46k of files; 6.6k folders) stored on a QNAP TR-004 DAS which uses 4 6TB drives in a RAID5 configuration. My Nucleus One has recognized and worked fine with 6 and 8 TB drives but not with the 16.3TB QNAP drive. When I plug the QNAP into any PC it is recognized as an external accessible drive. So, I am wondering if there is a Nucleus One limit to the size that the USB drive can be? Any thoughts would be appreciated.
If you set it up with Software Control then it won’t work as external storage for Linux OS computers, like the Nucleus One, since it runs a variant of Linux.
Thanks for your quick and helpful reply. After unplugging from the Nucleus, I changed the QNAP switch settings to RAID5, pressed the reset for 3 sec until it beeped once. Then I reconnected it to Nucleus but the QNAP still was not recognized. Then I connected the QNAP to a PC that had the control software and verified that the DAS was now configured correctly as external storage for Linux. Any other suggestions?
The QNAP TR-004 isn’t usable as a directly attached RAID DAS with the Roon Nucleus.
Roon OS can only mount standard USB storage devices and doesn’t include the driver needed for QNAP’s RAID controller (JMicron bridge).
The enclosure will work fine when connected to a PC or NAS and shared over the network via SMB or NFS, but it won’t appear when plugged straight into the Nucleus.
If you open the Roon Nucleus Web UI → Support → Logs → RoonOS.log, you might see something like:
usb 2-1: new SuperSpeed USB device number 4
usb 2-1: New USB device found, idVendor=152d, idProduct=0561 (JMicron)
scsi host6: uas
scsi 6:0:0:0: Direct-Access QNAP External RAID5 0206 PQ: 0 ANSI: 6
sd 6:0:0:0: [sdb] Attached SCSI removable disk
blk_update_request: I/O error, dev sdb, sector 0
Those I/O errors mean the kernel doesn’t know how to interpret the RAID mapping (the bridge needs QNAP’s translation layer).
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Thanks for solving the mystery. Glad to know it wasn’t operator error on my part.
Actually, not quite true. It is not usable if setup to Use Software Control, because, as I and you mentioned, Linux cannot run the drivers, and the Nucleus can’t run drivers even if they did exist. However, it does have the option for hardware raid programmed by Dip Switches, which will allow it to be used with Linux OS without drivers. As shown in the grid clipped from the device manual.
I think the issue is that the RAID has to be setup from the start one way or the other. Just switching it after the RAID in software has been created doesn’t work, I don’t think.
Either way, I suggest you call the Manufacturer’s tech support and discuss what you are trying to do and have them give you guidelines.
From the get-go I wondered about needing to reformat the RAID array to achieve linux compatibility. I’m still waiting to hear back from QNAP re this issue.
The QNAP support team suggests that the TR-004 Raid5 array needs to be formatted by the Nucleus in order for it to be recognized. But, since the Nucleus cannot do formatting, the array would have to be formatted by a Linux computer. But even that wouldn’t work since the Nucleus’ OS doesn’t have the required linux drivers. So, it would appear that the Nucleus can only recognize single-drive attached storage.