Setup

Setup couldn't really be any easier, install the drives in the drive caddies or NVMe slots, plug in the power and connect the USB Type-C cable to a suitable port on your computer or NAS, and you're ready to start using the D8 Hybrid. As a DAS connected to your computer, you can obviously configure the first two SATA drives in RAID mode and this is simply done by turning the dial at the rear to the required RAID mode, pressing the reset button for five seconds and powering on the DAS. The drives will need to be configured and formatted before they can be used, just like any new drive being connected to your system. The D8 Hybrid is now ready to be used, just like a normal external drive.

Note that within Windows, it's not possible to configure any of the drives into any kind of soft-RAID configuration, as Windows Disk Management will simply inform you that it's not supported. However, it is possible to do this when the D8 Hybrid is connected to a TerraMaster NAS. It might also be possible with other NAS appliances or operating systems.


We just wanted to quickly show how the two Realtek USB 3.2 Gen 2 hubs are connected as well. As you can see from the USB View screenshots above, the primary USB hub connects to all the ASMedia USB to SATA bridge chips, with the only one active here being the RAID capable ASM1352R, which shows up as a single device for the operating system. All the devices connected to the secondary hub are the USB to NVMe bridge chips. It is recommended to directly connect the D8 Hybrid to a USB port on your motherboard, not one that is passed through another USB hub. When using a hub we experienced some random disconnect issues. This is mainly an issue on desktop systems that often have some of their USB ports wired via internal hubs and secondary PCBs.

Software

TerraMaster provides a copy of TPC Backupper Standard Edition 7.3.1 from AOMEI for download, which unfortunately has a nag feature to get you to upgrade to the professional version. TerraMaster's partnership with AOMEI does come with a small discount on this upgrade, but not one that is overly enticing. TPC Backupper allows for a wide range of system backup options, but several features such as Outlook/email backup is behind a Pro version paywall. The same applies to most of the sync options, as well as more useful features like system cloning. It's at least possible to create bootable media with the free version, but a portable version of the backup software requires the even more pricey Technician edition. It's nice to get some backup software included with the hardware, but considering this one is freely available anyway, it's kind of hard to see the value on offer here. That said, TPC Backupper worked well enough to create a backup image, and it was also straightforward to restore the image. In fact, we restored it to one of the NVMe drives inside the D8 Hybrid, which was quite a slow process, but it could be a means of making sure the right image was restored, without overwriting a working OS install for example.