QNAP TL-R1200C-RP(USB) Rackmount USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C high-Capacity JBOD Storage 12 Bay

If you've been trying to find a way to attach a bunch of disks via USB to turn a machine into a NAS, this is the best product in this category and I've tried so many. TERRAMASTER, Yottamaster, Sabrent, OWC, you name it -- this thing is the only product I've found that checks all the checkboxes and is reliable even in the 8-bay size. From a perspective of using this with Proxmox or TrueNAS or Unraid: This is just a generic DAS. It shows up as 2 USB 3.2 generic hubs when it's empty. Each time when you insert a disk, a ASMedia UAS device corresponding to that disk shows up with USB ID 174c:55aa. It works just fine without any Linux UAS quirks. It also supports hot plug / hot un-plug on a per drive basis without disturbing any of the other bays. I've tried disks as big as 24TB and had no issues. You don't really need to run any of the Windows/Ubuntu/Linux tools -- it shipped with the latest firmware and just works out of the box. It also passes through each drive's model/SN correctly, as well as SMART stats via just smartctl. I left the fans at the Auto setting on the rear switch and it was pretty quiet. Of course with 28TB spinning drives you really don't want it in your face, the hard drive seek noise dominates any hint of fan noise from the enclosure. The DAS powers on and off automatically after a power failure. I know all of this doesn't sound like a lot, but trust me, over the course of 2 years I've bought 10 different cheaper DASes from other brands that claim to do these things. They all had deal breaking flaws. They either intermittently had data corruption (ZFS checksum errors), hangs, randomly lost the partition table for the drive until a power cycle, disks disappear off USB, or had an annoying power button per drive bay and no ability to automatically power everything on after power failure. It's refreshing to finally see something that works.

QNAP did it with their TL-D800C. I just want the most obvious thing! I want some drive bays slapped on a fast USB plug. I don't want backup software, RAID, or anything. I use ZFS which is far better than RAID. And even software RAID is better now than hardware RAID. How hard can that be? Apparently nigh impossible! I tried Sabrient's and Yottamaster's, both total garbage. Sabrient's had no less than 10 soft power switches, which must be tickled after every reboot...I mean, nobody wants to run anything unattended, and everyone wants a lot of extra fiddling to power up, right? 🙄 Hello Captain Obvious! If I didn't want a drive powered on I wouldn't put the drive in! Obviously there was zero thought put into actual user experience. Yottamaster -- also a total failure. At least they didn't add a bunch of stupid power switches, but the drives kept getting checksum errors, retries, and dropping out. I have 8 drives, of various brands, various ages and sizes, all of which worked perfectly after I returned the Yottamster and put them in this QNAP unit. It was two units, so not a matter of a single defect. It was totally impossible to use and corrupted data. Apparently Yottamaster is terrible at testing. Oh, and the drive sleds often got stuck in the cheap chassis. Just throwing junk together hoping people won't return it. So thank you, QNAP! These actually work reliably. 10 Gb USB, screwless insertion, no soft power switches, decent price point, good (and quiet) fans, hot-swappable, no drivers. No extra junk to bypass like RAID logic or soft power switches. Works perfectly on FreeBSD 14 with ZFS.

Fais le travail

Starting out I was impressed with the packaging and quality of the box. I have a wrap NAS too. Till I saw a usb A to C cord. This is a huge problem that most light users won’t realize but that EXTREMELY limits the performance of this box. Get a usb C to C cable. If your computer doesn’t have one, get one, or better yet, get another computer. A “cheap” new one is probably better than what you’ve got, exponentially. As a nearly decade long user of QNAP products, I can say the OS, and websites, and required management programs are pretty unintuitive. They are god-awful when you take into consideration that they are one of, if not, the biggest names in hard drive enclosures. Windows isn’t great, mac versions are under supported and laughable. I’m starting it and the qnap jbod manager program. Its seeing disks intermittently or just not being recognized by the computer at all. I have used multiple cables and updated the computer and tried updating the jbod. The auto firmware update restarted my computer but didn’t update the firmware on the jbod. Tried to manually download and install firmware but There isn’t one on their site. Just jbod manager software. This is NOT A BEGGINER FRIENDLY SOLUTION. I HATE saying that. This should be the standard in every home but is far from a “simple setup”. Do better QNAP, and the entire industry. Update. Their customer service is basically non existent. Even the chat function says “nobody is available, fording you to create a service ticket”. Right now I have an unusable product. Updating to 1 star till I get a resolution.

Tested with Windows 10, it works great, no issue at all. It give the SMART status of the drives which not very common with external enclosures. Big plus since you can tell before a drive dies and have a chance to salvage data before it's too late. My main con is that the QNAP software does not show what "letters" are on the disks so it takes more steps to know which is which when trying to find a specific disk to remove.