Don’t bin your old QNAP: run OpenMediaVault on it, with quiet fans and working lights
A free, open source plugin that gives QNAP hardware everything QTS did, on an open platform you control.
If you own a QNAP NAS, you’ve probably wondered what happens when QTS stops getting updates for your model, or when you simply stop trusting it. The hardware is usually fine: decent CPUs, good drive bays, years of life left. It’s the software that ages out.
The obvious escape is to install a normal Linux NAS system instead. Plenty of people try it, and plenty of them give up within a day, because the box suddenly behaves like it’s broken:
- The fans run flat out and never slow down (or never speed up).
- There are no fan or case temperatures to look at.
- The status and drive lights stay dark or show nonsense.
- The front buttons do nothing.
That’s because QNAP runs all of this through a custom controller chip that only its own software knows how to talk to. Change the software and the box goes deaf and blind.
I’ve fixed that for OpenMediaVault (OMV). The plugin is called openmediavault-qnap, it’s free, and you install it with a few clicks.
Why OpenMediaVault?
OMV is plain Debian Linux with a clean web interface and a proper plugin system. It runs happily on a 2-bay box with modest memory, it doesn’t lock you into one way of doing storage (RAID, ZFS, single disks, whatever suits you), and it’s genuinely community-driven.
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I came to it from TrueNAS. TrueNAS is a fine product, but in my experience it’s increasingly built for business customers, and the free community edition feels like an afterthought: hard to extend, and it doesn’t really listen to home users. OMV is open in both its source and how you can extend it, which is exactly what made it possible to plug QNAP’s hardware in properly.
What the plugin gives you
- Quiet, automatic fans, like Smart Fan in QTS. Pick Quiet, Normal or Performance, or set your own temperatures. They follow the processor, the case, the hard drives and NVMe SSDs.
- Lights that mean something again: a status light that turns red when something is wrong (a fan fault, a failed or nearly full volume) and blinks when a disk group is degraded, plus drive activity lights.
- “Find this drive”: blink a bay’s light red from the web page, so you pull the right disk.
- Working buttons and beeps: USB Copy and Reset can run tasks you choose, with QTS-style beeps if you want them.
- QM2 expansion cards: the card’s fan and slot lights work too.
- Dashboard gauges, temperature history graphs and email alerts when a fan stops, a disk fails or a pool degrades.
- Power settings like “turn back on after a power cut”, and a fix for QNAP models that hang when restarting under Linux.
- Night mode that dims the front lights in the evening.
It’s careful with your hardware too. If the plugin ever stops or crashes, the fans go to full speed: loud is fine, overheated is not. It never wakes sleeping drives just to read a temperature, and it doesn’t use any of QNAP’s own software.
Getting started
Already running OpenMediaVault 8 on your QNAP? It takes about five minutes, and no command line:
- Download one file from the latest release.
- In OMV, open System, Plugins, click Upload, choose the file, then click Install.
- Open System, QNAP, Drivers and click Set up drivers. It installs everything the hardware needs and turns fan control on.
- Open the Status page and watch the fans settle down.
Still on QTS? I wrote a step-by-step guide that walks through backing up, installing OMV on a QNAP and setting up the plugin, written for people who have never used Linux: Moving from QNAP QTS to OpenMediaVault.
Will it work on my QNAP?
It’s fully tested on a TS-253D with a QM2 SSD card. It’s built on the open source qnap8528 and qnap-qm2 drivers by 0xGiddi, which support many more x86 QNAP models (the TS-x51, TS-x53, TS-x64 and TS-x73 families, TVS models and others). Everything is detected automatically, so those should work, but they haven’t been confirmed yet. If you try it on another model, a short test report on GitHub helps the next person.
Common questions
Can I install OpenMediaVault on a QNAP NAS?
Yes, on Intel and AMD based QNAP models. OpenMediaVault goes onto a separate USB SSD and the drive bays stay free for your data. QNAP’s small internal flash, where QTS lives, is left untouched. The step-by-step guide covers the whole move.
How do I control QNAP fans on Linux?
QNAP fans are driven by an embedded controller chip (an IT8528 on most models). The open source qnap8528 driver lets Linux talk to it, and this plugin runs automatic fan curves on top, set from the OpenMediaVault web page instead of the command line.
Why are my QNAP fans so loud after installing Linux, TrueNAS or OpenMediaVault?
Because nothing is telling the controller chip what to do, so it falls back to full speed (or never speeds up). On OpenMediaVault, installing this plugin and clicking Set up drivers fixes it.
Do I need to know Linux?
No. You upload one file, click Install, then click Set up drivers. Every page is written in plain language.
Can I go back to QTS later?
Usually yes, if you install OpenMediaVault on a separate USB drive and leave the internal flash alone: remove the USB drive and the NAS boots QTS again. QTS will want to set up the data disks from scratch, so keep a backup.
Is it free?
Yes. The plugin and the drivers are free and open source, and nothing from QNAP’s own software is used.
How it was built
Someone had already done the hard part: 0xGiddi reverse engineered the controller chip and shared the drivers. What was missing was everything a normal person needs on top. I’d never built anything for Debian or OMV, so I built it over a weekend with Claude, an AI assistant, while I sat next to the NAS and checked every claim with my own eyes and ears: which fan speed was too loud, which bay lit up, whether the drives still went to sleep. I wrote about that process on LinkedIn.
Links
- Project website: nader-eloshaiker.github.io/omv-qnap-plugin
- Source code, releases and issues: github.com/nader-eloshaiker/omv-qnap-plugin
- Guide: Moving from QNAP QTS to OpenMediaVault
- Discussion on Reddit: r/qnap thread
There’s a lot of good QNAP hardware out there that doesn’t need to go to landfill. Give yours a second life.
