Thick, Thin, or Static Volume; What type should you choose for your QNAP?

Hi my name is craig, I'm the technical manager here at

qnap

uk and after a couple of our other videos we had a few questions from different viewers asking the differences between the three

type

s of

volume

s we have available on

qnap

. Those three

type

s of

volume

s would be, first of all, the

static

volume, then we have

thin

provisioned volumes and

thick

provisioned volumes, so I thought I would show you the differences between them when you

should

choose

one over the other and maybe a disadvantage. of one or two of them on a different type also to give you an example of this, I have a nas setup here.

It's not generally the recommended way to set bananas, but it's just for demonstration purposes, so I can set all three here, all three volume types, and with this I have a ts-983 xu dash rp which is a stand of rap 1u nas, it has four three and a half inch bays, five two and a half inch bays and me. I've also put a qm2 card in the back with four SSDs in there as well and just to have enough drives to illustrate the differences this is

what

this drive looks like so if we move on to storage and snapshots you can see the setup I have here , so I'll expand the different types.

I'm going to close storage group one with the system volume because that's not the one I want to show the differences. So here we have storage pool 2 and in it I have several different volumes created so we can see the types here, we have

thin

and

thick

and we even have an iscsi lum that is configured as a thin one. Also, at the bottom we have data volume 3, which is

what

we would call a

static

volume, so when you create a new volume anywhere, we give you the three options here on the screen and the default will always be Volume thick and you have the different options and it gives you a little explanation about the differences right here on the choice screen, so the static volume is the single allocation of fixed space, so what you create is what you have and you can't . use snapshots on a static volume um when you have the thick or the thin um they both support snapshots and the difference between a thick volume and a thin volume is that if you create a thick volume with 500 gigs, it will immediately reserve 500 gigs immediately it's locked on that volume, so nothing else can use it.

If you're using a thin volume, you could create that volume at 500 gigs, but since you just created it and you haven't put any data into the actual size of that one. The 500 gig volume is effectively zero, very small, so it just allocates space as you use it, so if you copy right 10 gigs of data, that thin 500 gig volume now becomes a size 10 gigs basically, that's how it's going to work, so we'll illustrate that in a moment here, so those are the three options you have, so we'll start with the static volumes. They have the best performance by a small margin because there is no overhead running a storage pool or anything like that, the downside of a static volume is if I go in here and manage it we can see how I configured it so I have the disks nas drives one and two assigned, I have three and four spares so I can do something with these, they are simply configured in a raid 0 for testing purposes, I do not recommend using raid 0 for normal use, so here, with drives one and two, this completely consumes both drives.

I can't use those two disks for anything else. only for this volume and in many cases that is fine, this is how many users may want to configure it absolutely fine to use this type of configuration, now the options disappear if you want to do something different with the nas, so if we look at the storage pool 2, I created the thick and thin volumes a little differently, so the thick and thin volumes don't actually have raid configured, the storage pool does if it were to go to storage. pool and click manage we can see how I set up this whole pool so I'm using two of the pcie nvme SSDs here so I added them as a storage pool to raid again raid 0 no I don't recommend it but here is where everything is configured in the storage pool.

Every volume you create within that storage pool, whether thick or thin, will absorb whatever protection or speed options or whatever you have configured on that raid pool, whatever. raid version in which you have chosen everything in it, you will share it, so what we can see here from the storage pool because I have two volumes here, a thick volume and a thin volume, both of them I created at 500 gigs in capacity now the thin volume has added absolutely no space to the table um used here the line chart of the storage pool bar chart so when I go and look at that I can see that the volumes and the luns are taking up about 590 gigabytes of the The space now almost all of it is immediately taken up by the thick volume because it's preallocated storage, so when I created that 500 gig volume, I immediately grabbed and reserved 500 gigs of capacity directly from that storage pool, so we'll always have it thin.

Volume is pretty clever in the way it does it, it just allocates space as it's used, so the added benefit here is especially if you're working in a big company or something and you have a department that comes to you as necessary. manager and says hello to the marketing team, we need five terabytes of space. You can see that here in my storage pool I actually only have 1.8 terabytes and you as an IT manager may know that yes, they can use five terabytes of space, but it may take them five years to get to that level.

For the first few years they may only need a few hundred gigs for what they are doing, so the added benefit is that I can create a new volume on my storage. group I'm also going to create a thin volume. I'm going to click Next, so I chose storage pool 2 because that's where I want it to live. All the different storage groups are listed here so you can assign these volumes anywhere. So I'll click Next. I'm going to call it marketing because marketing wanted that five terabyte volume, so I'm going to change this number here to terabytes and change it to five terabytes.

Now this

should

. In some people's opinion, it's really not possible because there are only 1.8 terabytes available in the entire storage pool. I don't have that much capacity on this volume in this storage pool, but what it will allow me to do will allow me to allocate it. but it's going to say that I've oversubscribed to the storage pool, but if I click next, it says to monitor the storage pool because it can't get to 100 usage on this volume with the current storage allocated, so yeah I click OK and I click finish, it will activate and create that 5 terabyte volume for me, but it won't take up any space, any additional space from that storage pool because there's nothing in this yet.

We haven't copied any data there, so I as an IT administrator, I'm going to monitor this folder, I'm going to make sure that this volume doesn't reach a size that exceeds the size of the storage pool now, if you ever come to a situation where I see that the marketing team is starting to use up quite a bit of space and I'm actually going to run out of physical storage, that's where storage pools and flexibility can come into play, so what you can do is right click on that storage group. you can go to manage and there is an option here to expand the pool, so to expand the pool, you can simply expand the pool if you have a redundant raid mode setup, you can replace the existing drives with larger drives, or you can just create and add a new pool, so that's what I'm going to do, so I'm going to

choose

the other two nvme ssds that I added there.

I'll set it to raid 0 just for speed. Here we will do it. click next and we'll expand it, so we'll click OK, so now this is going to remove some of this excessive provisioning that I just made, so I still don't have enough space for the full five terabytes of what I've created, but will allow me and allow that marketing portfolio to grow even more so we can see right now that the blue line here is taking over, you know, 75 percent of the space because it has quite a few more subscriptions, once this. Storage group v expansion has occurred.

This blue line is going to go up a little bit because I have more physical space now, so I'm not as subscribed, so we're going to let that die down and finish now, so that's going to take just a couple of minutes to expand it and create that new regrouping. and add the drive, so we'll come back as soon as it's done, there we go, so we'll click OK and click. close, so what's going to happen now is we can see that this blue line has moved quite a bit up on the chart, so I'm still oversubscribed.

I still have allocated more space than I physically have, but now I have more room for that volume to physically grow, so I can see that the storage pool has a lot of extra space available. Likewise, if I were to create a thick volume of another 500 gigs, this green bar will immediately jump another 500. gigs because it's going to use that space, the reason I really like thin volumes is that I can be flexible with what I'm doing inside of my storage, so if I initially decide when to set up the nas, I only need to share some basic storage.

I'll go ahead and create it and I'll have a thick volume or a thin volume of a certain size, but what it does is any unused space in the pool is free for all the volumes, so if I decide in the future oh, I need a nice cozy volume, I need something else for a different purpose and I want to keep it separate from everything else. You get that flexibility with the storage pool because all the volumes it contains can be different sizes, all within the same space, so they can all use the same space and each volume won't remove drives for redundancy, so, for example, if you have four units in a raid, five will effectively lose one unit of that raid's capacity for protection. of the data, so in this example here you don't have to lose that for every volume you create, it is initially lost in the storage pool, each volume within it simply absorbs the protection that the pool has and therefore You can still expand the static volumes, so they are not completely static, there is still an expansion option, but the expansion options will always consume the entirety of the disks you allocate, so you cannot add some additional storage to that volume static and then decide you want a nice dirty volume, it won't work like that, you have to allocate all the space to what you have, so if I were to press expand, oh I can't do it, something is already happening, but if I were to press the expand option and it would allow you to go in and change the different options within it so you can expand it and add more drives just like we did with the storage pool, but again, it's just for a single purpose.

It is for exactly the same task that is already running. You can't add more to it. Well, I hope I have answered some questions. Just one last point. I wanted to cover you if you make a mistake choosing between fine or coarse. There's always an option here, so if you go into the volume, if I were to look at my data ball, which is a thin volume, there's an option up here, if you click on the actions tab, you can convert it to a thick one. volume um and the final point here is if you're on a thick volume and you decide that you want to free up some unused space on that thick volume to get back into the storage pool, you can go in here and manage that and make it a thin one as well, so you can convert from thick to thin to thin to thick as many times as you want, you just can't do that with a static volume.

The static volume will always be a static volume. The only way to change it is to actually move

your

data. to another volume if possible or make a backup, delete that volume and create a new one, there is no way to do that and if you were to try to take a snapshot of a static volume you will get a small error here saying that a snapshot cannot be taken static volume, you should use thick or thin, while I have snapshots enabled there on both thin and thick volume, so they are supported, if you have any questions please let us know.

We are pretty quick at responding to comments here , so yeah, if you have any other questions and want to see other videos, leave suggestions in the comments field. Thank you so much, goodbye.