No time for nap, update your QNAP: RAIDed NAS data corruption bug squashed

Wednesday 26th July 2017 14:09 GMT Ol' Grumpy

Nice work Wayne. I guess that gives me something to do this evening!

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1. Wednesday 26th July 2017 19:37 GMT Anonymous Coward
  
  Re: "There is never a case when RAID5 is the best choice, ever!"
  
  Nonsense fearmongering.
  
  "very often, your data is safer on a single hard drive than it is on a RAID5 array"
  
  To summarise: the non recoverable rate on a disk is 1 in X
  
  If you have a RAID 5 array that requires more X reads to rebuild you will lose data.
  
  Firstly, this is debatable, there is a *chance* you will lose data.
  
  Secondly, if you need that much storage, if it was on a single disk, you would also have the same chance of a non-recoverable read error.
  
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  1. Wednesday 26th July 2017 21:29 GMT Anonymous Coward
    
    Re: "There is never a case when RAID5 is the best choice, ever!"
    
    I enjoyed Raid 0 but avoided the sequels till Raid 6 but that was back in the day of all the crap spinning rust about at the time that failed if you farted next to the hot swap bays.
    
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    1. Thursday 27th July 2017 16:20 GMT JEDIDIAH
      
      Re: "There is never a case when RAID5 is the best choice, ever!"
      
      I don't need to "do the math". I have been using this stuff for years. I have been hearing the stupid fear mongering for years too and I have yet to be impressed.
      
      Proper backup strategies apply regardless of what your primary storage type is. As long as you avoid pretending that RAID is a backup strategy, it's all good.
      
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    2. Saturday 29th July 2017 04:39 GMT Tim99
      
      Re: "There is never a case when RAID5 is the best choice, ever!"
      
      If your data is that important to you, pay the price. For a small system use RAID1 - Bigger ones RAID10. What, that's too expensive? Then your data is not that important/time critical - Use normal backups.
      
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2. Thursday 27th July 2017 17:06 GMT Donn Bly
  
  Re: "There is never a case when RAID5 is the best choice, ever!"
  
  I've read that thread before -- a number of incorrect assumptions are made resulting in the math being wrong. There are reasons for not using RAID5 but his reason is not among them.
  
  Basically, he states that the 10^14 bit error rate means that if you are reading 12.5TB from any single drive or collection of drives you have a 100% chance of an unrecoverable read failure that results in data loss. This not a paraphrase, it is an explicit statement that is used to justify the rest.
  
  So, according to him, if I have a 2 TB drive and read it from end to seven times then at some point in there the drive will have failed - or If I have seven separate 2TB drives and read each of them from end to end at least one of them will fail. Not just might fail, he states that it is a 100% statistical certainty.
  
  If drives were truly that unstable and unreliable none of us would ever be able to boot an operating system and use it for a week.
  
  If drives were that unstable and unreliable then we would never be able to back up a data store larger than 12.5 TB, and any smaller data store could never be backed up reliably.
  
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Wednesday 26th July 2017 16:28 GMT Bluto Nash

Let's not rush into this. Unless you're impacted.

Note from the QNAP technical advisory that nobody seems to have mentioned, so that maximum panic/clicks was maintained:

The following models are NOT affected:

TS-409, TS-409U, TS-509, TS-809, TS-809 Pro, TS-809U, TS-x10, TS-x10U, HS-210, HS-210-D, HS-210-X, TS-x12, TS-x12E, TS-x12P, TS-x12U, TS-x19P, TS-x19P+, TS-x19PII, TS-x19U, TS-x20, TS-x20D, TS-x20U, TS-x21, TS-x21U, TS-x28, TAS-x28, TS-x30, TS-x31, TS-x39, TS-x39U, TS-x39 Pro, TS-x39 Pro II, TS-x39 Pro II+, TS-239H, SS-x39, TS-x59, TS-x59U, TAS-x68, TS-x69, TS-x69L, TS-x69U, TS-x69 Pro, TS-269H

...though tonight I'm likely to review what the latest firmware is for my own QNAP.

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2. Thursday 27th July 2017 16:21 GMT JEDIDIAH
  
  Re: Let's not rush into this. Unless you're impacted.
  
  Whatever. I needed to do a firmware update anyways. It will probably be done before I finish here. =P
  
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Wednesday 26th July 2017 20:20 GMT alt9

This article should be a you should never buy a qnap array again.

Seriously,

This is at best unethical, at worst criminal behavior on Qnap's part. If you actually read what they did a whole layer of qnap management should be fired, and a major mea culpa issue with a code review plan so that this never happens again.

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1. Wednesday 26th July 2017 22:23 GMT Mark 65
  
  Re: This article should be a you should never buy a qnap array again.
  
  I'll be honest, I love my QNAP NAS. I own one of the more expensive i5 powered variants that can, and does, run various servers on it. I like its compact size, hot swappable drives, web interface etc. However, this sort of thing does concern me - that whole aspect of not overly being in control of your own destiny. Also I have noted a change in QNAP with regards quality. My expensive NAS has plastic disk trays. My older 4 bay QNAP has nicer metal ones. Needless to say the plastic ones resonate at times - a touch irritating given the price tag and I suspect due to the quick release drive holding mechanism. I would prefer them to be metal with rubber grommets on the drive contact points. I also had an issue with them about firmware behaviour with a UPS system which mysteriously fixed itself with a firmware update that made no mention of fixes to the UPS software or configuration.
  
  I originally came from a tower pc running Ubuntu as my "NAS" but downsized for the size and power savings along with the more appropriate interface for the task. If I were replacing the system today then I think I would do so by building my own box and running one of the NAS-targeted distributions or a linux server variant such as Ubuntu, Centos etc. At least that way fixes would be more readily available as would the ability to modify (or not) the settings and packages as I saw fit. The argument for a QNAP is, after all, that they have performed all the quality control and packaged up everything so it should just work - this is not what seems to be happening.
  
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  1. Wednesday 26th July 2017 23:53 GMT alt9
    
    Re: This article should be a you should never buy a qnap array again.
    
    Yeah if their presupposition though is that it just works, they just completely borked it. This applied to raid 5 and 6. So it wasn't just raid 5 corruption. It was much more insidious then that. If the point is you're selling a protected data device that's easy to use and it doesn't protect against data corruption and when users report for months the issue, there should be a lot more major stink about this given he numbers that they sell these units in.
    
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    1. Thursday 27th July 2017 16:22 GMT JEDIDIAH
      
      Re: This article should be a you should never buy a qnap array again.
      
      Sure. They definitely deserve a tarring and feathering over this.
      
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Thursday 27th July 2017 08:22 GMT privacychair

Just upgraded last month, but still had to check versions

Dang, for a second I thought I was in for another update, but looks like I just made the hot fix version.

Model:

TS-431

Current firmware version:

4.3.3.0238

Date:

2017/07/03

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