For anyone interested, these mods were accomplished on my QNAP TS-470 Pro by following the guides here, and well as another level1techs forum detailing how to use the UEFI BIOS Updater. Edit: The reason I didn’t link it is because new accounts are limited to only 2 links, and the other is below.
The trick was getting my hands on the QNAP BIOS file as they don’t like giving those files out, so I was able to find a BIOS file on a support forum for its bigger brother, the TS-670 Pro. Since they use almost the same (if not the same) mainboard, it works. Please note that this file will only work for revision 1.x of those motherboards.
Sigh. Since this is a new account, I guess I can’t upload a zip file, so instead I hosted it here. To flash this particular BIOS file, just make a FreeDOS bootable USB drive using Rufus, then add the unzipped files into the drive. Once FreeDOS is loaded on the NAS at startup, just execute the batch file. Good luck!
Hi there Glassman,
I too have a TS-470 Pro and was wondering about NVMe support. Apart from the BIOS update, how did you physically attach the SSD?
The thread goes back 8 years, and I’m not sure I can follow all the different issues and problems people got, but don’t just want to jump straight in flashing a new version of the BIOS. I need to understand what the risks are, can I get back if it all fails, and is there a risk to my current RAID.
Any insight you can give would be most appreciated
Sorry. I actually never saw an email regarding this and only came across the post when I went back onto my old laptop. One of the tabs was still open …
I attached the SSD from buying an NVME PCI-express adapter and installing it. Something like this …
That particular card is a little long for the NAS itself, so I just cut like an inch off the end with a pair of scissors, which is fine because there are no traces in that area, but if you don’t want to do that, just find a shorter one.
Also, yes, you can lose your data if you’re planning to boot something like proxmox or truenas in place of QTS. If you do that, the best thing you can do is plug in a spare drive and backup all your data from your raid with rsync first. Even if you’re just using your new card to host spare drives, backup your data anyway, because there’s always a chance that something can happen during a BIOS update, no matter how safe.
That being said, what do you have to lose? QTS is unsupported on your model now, and the performance is abysmal anyway … always has been.