TerraMaster D5 THUNDERBOLT 3 5-bay DAS

[TheLostSwede]

Probably because almost no one uses SAS drives at home?

Neither does anyone use a $700 drive enclosure at home... That was a really silly comment imho.

 

[Deleted member 158293]

TerraMaster have been making good progress the last couple years. IMO this is still too rough a product to be charging a premium price be it DAS or NAS.

Ie: releasing a DAS product having disconnecting issues under stress makes it pretty useless until it's fixed.

 

[Octavean]

Why would they put a SATA only backplane in it, when the Marvell controller supports SAS?

That is a good question, although, I think typical small office / home office environments are fine with SATA. That is probably who they were targeting since the enthusiast crowd probably doesn't much use Thunderbolt.

I would have liked to have seen SAS support though.

My question is this:

I have a RocketRAID 2720SGL card that I purchased a year or so ago. Its a PCIe 2.0 RAID host adapter that supports SATA/SAS for up to 8x drives. Up to 8x drives has me wondering:

Is there some sort of BIOS or firmware limiting the host adapter to only 5x drives or is it that the backplane only supports 5x drives physically,.....??? Maybe its some oddity resulting from using Thunderbolt 3,....???

I mean, why go with a host adapter that can support 8x drives then hobble it with only 5,......???

If someone where to buy the TerraMaster D5 would they be able to make it support the full 8x drives with a firmware upgrade (for a retail RocketRAID 2720SGL) and a backlane upgrade with 8 ports?

Inquiring minds want to know.

Edit:

For ~$700 USD I'm not going to find out for myself so I'm kind of counting on you guys at Techpoweup to find out for me,....

 

[crmaris]

The SATA card only supports up to 5x drives physically, so no way to check if it can support up to 8x.

The disconnection issue was a bummer for me as well, although in real life I only need a single machine connected to the DAS. In any case TerraMaster has been informed and its people are already looking at this problem that I encountered. With a single system connected, there were no issues during my extended testing period, under all conditions.

 

[AnarchoPrimitiv]

Why would they put a SATA only backplane in it, when the Marvell controller supports SAS?

I'd assume that anyone interested in using this predominantly for SAS would be in the market for more of an Enterprise solution (probably with more bays). Plus, utilizing SAS drives would only really offer a return on investment with a networked storage solution as in a DAS arrangement, SAS wouldn't really offer anything that SATAIII and raid couldn't, speed wise as well.

Additionally, decent SAS capable NAS solutions like the Areca ARC-8050T3 and the RocketStor 6628A are not that common with only a handful of units out their meeting those required specs. Plus, the cheapest stars at $1000 USD. Besides is absolute maximum throughput is your objective, then I'd personally bypass SAS for something akin to the RocketStor 6661A-NVMe which accepts 4x NVMe drives in various RAID modes.

 

[bug]

The SATA card only supports up to 5x drives physically, so no way to check if it can support up to 8x.

The disconnection issue was a bummer for me as well, although in real life I only need a single machine connected to the DAS. In any case TerraMaster has been informed and its people are already looking at this problem that I encountered. With a single system connected, there were no issues during my extended testing period, under all conditions.

Don't downplay this. It could be like poorly written multi-threaded code: working just fine on your dev machine when don't bother to stress it, yet falling apart quickly irl.
Let's wait for an official statement, at least.

 

[Octavean]

The SATA card only supports up to 5x drives physically, so no way to check if it can support up to 8x.

With all due respect, I hear what you are saying but I'm don't quite understand it.

As you pointed out, there is an installed HighPoint RocketRAID 2720SGL PCIe card. By all appearances it is a bone stock off the shelf card that should support 8 drives. Well there are some minor differences such as no retention bracket and 16 pins are parallel to the plane of the card rather then perpendicular but this is superficial.

There are two suggested testing methods.

The first would be to disassemble the TarraMaster D5 and remove the blue card from the HighPoint RocketRAID 2720SGL PCIe card. Then install the HighPoint RocketRAID 2720SGL PCIe card in a PC and use two mini-SAS SFF-8087 to 4 SATA cables connecting to a total of 8 hard drives (4 HDDs for each of the two breakout cables).

The second method would be to partially disassemble the TarraMaster D5 by removing the blackplane that supports only 5 drives and blue card installed in the HighPoint RocketRAID 2720SGL PCIe card. Then use two mini-SAS SFF-8087 to 4 SATA cables connected to a total of 8 Hard drives (4 HDDs for each of the two breakout cables).

Then Boot the system and see if all 8 drives are accessible.

Edit:

OK, I see now that in this case TarraMaster has basically just used the HighPoint RocketRAID software utility to setup and configure RAID arrays. While dated it is functional. So one "might" be able to start up the HighPoint "RAID Management Pro" interface and find the total supported drives there if it is correctly reported.

So for RAID Management version 2.6.20 (or thereabouts) on the home page you should see top tab options that read:

Global View, Physical, Logical, Setting, Event, SHI, Recover, Logout and Help

Under the "Physical" tab, the reported "Maximum Link Width" should be the maximum supported number of HDD's (I think). I suspect it will be 8 not 5.

Under the same "Physical" tab, the reported "Current Link Width" should be the current number of HDD's installed (I think).

I see that there are TarraMaster D4 and D8 models which likely differ internally by the number of physical SATA ports on the backplane and possibly the PSU. However, the D8 costs almost ~$2600 USD.

 

[crmaris]

An easier method, for me, would be to ask for the D8, break it apart and check its RAID controller

 

[thunderBucket]

Thanks for the review. In the 'setup' video, I noticed a 'Spare Pool' option. Do you recall if it offers the facility to nominate 4 drives as a RAID5 volume and allocate the remaining drive as a hot spare in the event of a failure?