QNAP TS231 + WD Purple 6TB + Hikvision Cameras = Brain Pain!

[WhosOnFirst]

Hi, have researched this and worked on this for over a week now and still can't figure out how to set this up. I have failed in setting this up. I did install a WD 1TB hard drive into the QNAP TS-231 and got one Hikvision camera recording to it but it formatted the whole drive so I could not connect another camera to the QNAP TS-231. This is far as I got.

I have a QNAP TS231 dual bay NAS with WD Purple 6TB drive (wlll buy another for Raid 1) and several Hikvision IP DS-2CD2132-IS cameras with V5.2.5 and V5.2.3 firmware installed.

1) Can't figure out how to create 2TB or smaller volumes on the WD 6TB hard drive installed in the QNAP TS-231 NAS.
2) Can't figure out how to get iVMS-4200 v4.0.7 to not format the entire hard drive so that more than one camera can record to the QNAP TS-231.
3) Created and set up iSCSI LUN's but could not get iVMS-4200 software to connect to them.

Any and all input will be greatly appreciated! Did a lot of online research but could not find the information that could help me. Thanks for any and all input!

 

[alastairstevenson]

1) Can't figure out how to create 2TB or smaller volumes on the WD 6TB hard drive installed in the QNAP TS-231 NAS.

Do you have the 'Logical Volume Manager' on your QNAP NAS? This may depend on the choices you made when installing QTS on an initialised system.
If so, in Storage Manager you can create logical volumes of arbitrary size from your storage pools, to suit the firmware-dependant size constraints of the cameras and NVRs.
Here is an example of a logical volume of 200GB set up for a camera that has that limit:

 

[WhosOnFirst]

Thanks for the response. I've tried a few times and reset up my QNAP TS-231 looking for the "Storage Pool" option but have never found it. I know next to nothing about NAS boxes but could it be I don't have that option since the QNAP TS-231 is a very low level NAS box and / or that it only has 2 drive bays which I can set up as: Single / JBOD / Raid 0 / Raid 1 ; being the only drive configuration options? I'm still working at getting this going so any further input is welcomed.

 

[alastairstevenson]

Looking at the product categorisation here https://www.qnap.com/i/en/product/ your TS-231 is in the same "Work Group / SOHO / Home (Middle-end)" grouping as my TS-431+, which I believe should therefore make it eligible to have the LVM / storage pools choice on first setup. But I'm not 100% sure of that.
But you can't just reset to defaults a running system to make that choice - you need to start from the bare metal state.
SOme more info here: https://www.qnap.com/i/uk/tutorial/con_show.php?op=showone&cid=91

 

[WhosOnFirst]

alastairstevenson; I'll give that a try. I'll remove the volumes and start anew. Thanks.

 

[alastairstevenson]

Well, good luck. Presumably you don't have a lot of data to back up.
But please double-check the categorisation - I wouldn't want you to trash your NAS for nothing.

 

[WhosOnFirst]

Ok, after reading the user manual and the online specs for the QNAP TS-231, I discovered it can't use storage pools and there is no way that I can see to divide up the disk volumes.... oh well.
And since the TS-231 has a very low powered cpu, I don't think it couldn't handle the dozen plus cameras data needs. Thank you all for your input, much appreciated!

 

[alastairstevenson]

Well that's a pity - LVM / storage pools give lots of flexibility to manage storage. I'm surprised though, as your TS-231 appears to be in the right classification.
The user manuals take a while to be updated. Did you see an explicit mention that LVM was not available - or was it simply not mentioned?

The QNAP QTS has a somewhat limited version of Linux - but it's possible to install add-ons to supplement the tools.
There is another way to create arbitrary sized shares that may be of interest as an experiment: https://www.ipcamtalk.com/showthread.php/54-Solving-some-NFS-issues-on-Hikvision-cameras?p=65442&viewfull=1#post65442
It may be possible to create the EXTx fs-formatted file on another system and copy it over - but I haven't tried that.