THICK, THIN, or STATIC Volume | What type should you choose for your QNAP NAS?

Thin and Thick Volumes (aka Flexible Volumes)

Thin and Thick Volumes, also called Flexible Volumes, must be created inside a Storage Pool. A storage pool covers all available space on the disks and RAID array selected to create the pool. Once a pool has been created, flexible volumes can be created and will allocate storage space within the pool as required. Flexible volumes support advanced storage features such as snapshot, Qtier, and SSD cache acceleration. Flexible volumes can also be resized flexibly, converted between thin and thick types, and backed up to a remote storage pool via snapshot replica.

Thin Volumes allocate space in the storage pool as data is written into the volume. Only the size of data in the volume is used up from the pool space, and free space in the volume does not take up any pool space. If data is deleted from the volume, that space can be freed and given back to the storage pool free space. The pool free space is shared among all thin volumes, and the NAS administrator must take care to ensure there is enough free space in the pool as more data is written to thin volumes. In case the pool space is not enough, thin volumes will enter read-delete or read-only mode until more pool space is available.

Thin volumes are recommended when you need to create multiple volumes and share the storage pool space efficiently between them. Also, thin volumes are recommended if you are planning to use volume snapshots. When using snapshots with thin volumes, only modifications to existing data on the volume will increase the snapshot used space, the size will be the same as the modified data.

Thick Volumes allocate the total size of the volume upon creation. No matter how much data is actually stored in the volume, the total size of the volume will always be used up in the pool. On the other hand, this space is guaranteed to be available exclusively for this volume, even if other volumes used up all remaining pool free space.

Thick volumes are recommended if you are creating multiple volumes but need to guarantee the space for a particular volume. The performance of a thick volume may also be slightly better than a thin volume in some situations.

Note: If you are using snapshots with a thick volume, writing new data to the empty space of the volume will increase the snapshot used space by the same size as the new data. You will need to monitor the pool free space and recycle older snapshots periodically in order to avoid running out of pool space. For this reason, thin volumes would be recommended when using snapshots.

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