I’ve been a user of QNAP products for over 10 years now. I have a couple of home systems running at the moment, including a TS-831X with a TR-004 enclosure attached to it. Last week I was prompted to update the external enclosure firmware to 1.1.0. After I did that, I had an issue where, once the unit spun down its disks, the volume would be marked as “Not active” by the system and I’d lose access to the data. Recovery was simple enough – I could either reboot the box or manually recover the enclosure via the QTS interface. I raised a job with QNAP web support, and we went back and forth with troubleshooting over the course of a week. The ticket was eventually escalated, and it was acknowledged that the current fix was to rollback to version 1.0.4 of the enclosure firmware.
The box is only used for media storage for Plex, but I figured it was worth backing up the contents of the external enclosure to another location in case something went wrong with the rollback. In any case, I’ve not done a downgrade on a QNAP device before, so I thought it was worth documenting the procedure here.
For some reason I needed to use Chrome over Safari in this example. I don’t know why that is. But whatever. In QTS, click on Storage & Snapshots, then Storage. Click on External RAID Management and then click on Check for Update.
You’ll see in this example, the installed TR-004 version is 1.1.0. Click on Browse to get the firmware file you want to roll back to.
You’ll get a stern warning that this kind of thing might cause problems.
Take a backup. Then tick the box.
The update will progress. It doesn’t take too long.
You then need to power off the enclosure and power it back on.
And, hopefully, your data will still be there. One side effect I noted was that the shared folder on that particular volume no longer had the correct permissions associated with the share. Fortunately, this is a home environment, and I’m using one user account to provide access to the share. I don’t know what you’d do if you had a complicated permissions situation in place.
And there you go. Like most things with QNAP, it’s a fairly simple process. This is the first time I’ve had to use QNAP support, and I found them responsive and helpful. I’ll report back if I get any other issues with the enclosure.