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

I read far too many online reviews before picking this drive bay and I’m really happy so far with choosing this one. I wanted a USB connected solution rather than a NAS as it means everything can be remotely backed up via Backblaze. I have the drives connected to an M4 Mac Mini and everything is working really well.

I filled the device with four 10TB WD Red Pro NAS drives that already had data on them. As a test, I set it to individual drive mode and Windows detected all the drives and assigned a letter for each one. This is exactly what you would expect. Next, I switched to software controlled mode and installed the software. I reconfigured the drives as one large RAID 5 array. It built the array quite quicky and Windows detected it as one large drive. Again, exactly what you would expect. I haven't connected it to my NAS because it wasn't purchased for that purpose so I can't comment on that aspect of the device. It wouldn't win any awards in the speed department but overall, I'm quite pleased with it for the price I paid. One point I feel I should make about QNAP NAS, DAS and JBOD enclosures is that the caddies really need the screws fitted as the clip in disk retaining strips don't support the drives well enough on their own. Personally, I feel that the instructions should tell the user to fit them rather than stating that fitting them is optional. Another thing is that if you have to replace a drive and rebuild the array, it doesn't start until the host is alive and is best to set the host not to sleep because if it does, it will interrupt the rebuild and can cause loss of all the data.

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+

I bought the QNAP TR-002 to house a couple of Seagate Enterprise drives for use as direct attached storage (DAS) for archiving purposes. Set-up was immensely frustrating, and the unit has only basic functionality as a DAS, with some disappointing drawbacks compared to using a purpose-built OEM external drive unit inclusive of hard drives (the latter would of course have cost more overall, hence my decision to try this QNAP device). Build quality is just about okay. It's all plastic, and the drive trays are VERY plasticky, feeling far too cheap and brittle, and seemingly insufficient to be able to carry the weight of a 3.5 inch hard drive without breaking in half. But, when the drives are installed, they provide some stability themselves. The drives clip in to the carriers (the clips are frighteningly brittle plastic and seem likely to snap in half as the unit ages) and don't necessarily require screws if the device is being installed and left where it is. Nevertheless, screws are provided and recommended for additional stability if the drive is being transported. But trying to get the TR-002 up and running was where the fun really started. It was painful, and I was initially so frustrated with its refusal to operate as it should that I had it all packed up and ready for return. But after having already purchased the two hard drives, I eventually relented and decided to persevere. The first problem was just getting it connected to a Mac. After installing the drives and software utility, plugging the unit in, connecting it to the Mac and switching it on, all that happened was that the drives would spin up, the blue USB light would come on briefly to indicate an active USB connection, but then the light would go out straight away and the drives would spin down, and that was that. Deadly silence. The drives would simply not mount. Neither Disk Utility nor the QNAP External RAID Manager software could help. The user guide is brief and gives no troubleshooting information that is of any relevance under such circumstances. After some considerable time, I eventually solved the connection issue by trial and error, although I'm still not sure precisely what made a difference. I tried different combinations of disconnecting the power, removing and reinstalling the drives, pressing the 'Set' button on the back of the unit, and swapping USB cables and ports on the Mac. After an hour of despair, a similar thing initially happened as before, i.e. the drives would spin up and then down again and the USB indicator would come on briefly and then go out, but this time the drives immediately began spinning up for a second time as the unit appeared to be trying desperately to leap back into life and connect to the Mac. After about 15 seconds of rumbling away, the drives appeared on the desktop and all appeared to be working. I have no idea precisely what eventually resolved this issue. The default factory configuration (set via three tiny, old hat dip switches on the back panel) is set to 'Software Control' and the unit came with the RAID mode configured to 'Individual' (i.e. two independent drives). The 'Software Control' setting enables you to change the RAID mode using software rather than fiddling around with the dip switches themselves (these also allow you to set the RAID mode without using the software). RAID options for the TR-002 are RAID 0, RAID 1, JBOD and 'Individual', where the latter makes each drive available as two completely independent external drives. I ran a soak test copying some heavy-duty files onto each drive with no problems. But I then installed a fully bootable macOS onto one of the drives to test it as a boot volume. This was another disappointment, as the TR-002 does not support booting from a macOS volume, seemingly because it can't establish a stable USB connection until long after the Mac has booted. This is not the case with a G-Tech external USB enclosure which supports booting via USB without problems. So I then decided to try the RAID 1 setting, one of the main reasons for choosing this device. But this, again, was no fun at all. Using the software to reconfigure the unit appeared to work initially, but when the unit restarted I was right back to the beginning, with the TR-002 completely failing to spin up and connect to the Mac. After another hour of wasted time trying to troubleshoot this same situation I eventually somehow managed to force a connection to the Mac once again. As expected, it then told me the drives required initialisation. So off to Disk Utility to format the drive(s)... More problems. Initialising the drives failed repeatedly, with Disk Utility reporting an error message saying the drives were corrupted. So I was back to more troubleshooting, connecting, disconnecting, powering down, removing and swapping drives, restarting etc. etc. and again, the unit eventually restarted and requested once more that the drives be initialised. This time, initialisation was a success. At long last, we were in RAID 1 mode, so again I ran a soak test copying some heavy-duty files and had no problems. But then I tried to partition the logical drive so that it appeared as several smaller logical drives on the desktop. This was a repeated failure, with Disk Utility reporting a drive error every time. So I contacted QNAP who responded in a couple of days, only to confirm that: "you are not able to create multiple partitions with this expansion bay." Well that was another disappointment. Again, my trusty old 'G-SAFE' RAID 1 enclosure has no issues in this regard. But then, after having tried unsuccessfully to partition the logical drive, it once again became totally unusable, with Disk Utility now unable to erase and reformat the drive as a single partition without reporting drive errors. So I appeared to be stuck yet again, and it was back to the troubleshooting. After jumping through all the hoops listed previously, I was eventually able to restart the TR-002 and successfully reformat the drives. But then I made the mistake of seeing how effective changing the dip switch settings on the back of the unit might be, compared to using the software to configure the unit. Despite following the user guide precisely, making changes to the dip switches resulted in complete chaos once again, with the drive becoming inoperable as on previous occasions. So lots more powering down, disconnecting, changing ports, swapping drives, etc. was required once more, and after another hour or so of trial and error, I managed to get the system working, having eventually been able to use the dip switches to change from RAID 1 back to 'Individual' mode. What a palava this thing is. I then attempted to partition the individual drives, assuming that, as it's no longer operating in a strict RAID mode, this shouldn't be a problem. But, you guessed it, more 'corrupted drive' messages from Disk Utility which failed miserably to partition even a single independent drive. After yet more time troubleshooting as before and an eventually successful restart, I was ultimately able to partition the individual drives without further ado. CONCLUSIONS After endless testing, I found this device to be insanely frustrating with regard to the initial set-up and any subsequent change of RAID mode, all of which took endless hours of troubleshooting to eventually get the thing to work properly in any selected mode. And all of which remains inexplicable, except to say that this device clearly does not like being switched from one mode to another, something that should be seamless but which instead creates total chaos. However, as and when you eventually get the thing working, it appears to be stable and reasonably quiet, copying data as expected without issues, at least for now. But other disappointments include no support for partitioning the logical drive when in RAID 1 mode. And it does not support booting from a bootable macOS drive or partition, so it cannot be used as an emergency start-up drive. None of the above instils great confidence with regard to long-term dependability or the safe keeping of valuable data. And it's not a substitute for a reliable data back-up option. Having said that, I'd already bought the hard drives, so I have resigned myself for the time being to continuing to use the TR-002 to provide some additional studio redundancy as a dual (two individual drives) drive enclosure for day-to-day archiving, but am going back to G-Technology (now a Western Digital 'Sandisk' branded product) for their superior, proven, more fully-featured, and more easily installed and configured RAID systems. Based on my experience, I would not recommend the QNAP TR-002 as a RAID enclosure. Although I was eventually able to get the device working, this was not without endless hours of trial and error. And the inexplicable refusal of the TR-002 to just do as it was told was immensely frustrating. With all that in mind, I'd say that this is quite simply the worst ever external DAS unit I have experienced in 30 years of using and configuring Mac systems and peripherals. Would I buy another? Nope, sorry QNAP. It's cheap and cheerful, and you get what you pay for. I'd rather pay more and have an easy life!

I bought this to extend an existing QNAP NAS and I wish I'd never bothered. It's possible to get it to interact with the NAS after endless tinkering but as soon as you restart the NAS, it's almost impossible to get this to reconnect. Eventually after rebooting both devices in different orders, one might be lucky enough for the RAID to reconnect, but it takes far, far longer than it should. Additionally, you can't extent the device once you install it. I bought this with 2 drives, planning to add 2 more later. Doesn't work. This is the single worst tech device I've ever bought.

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.

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.

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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