Power

As the D8 Hybrid doesn't have a CPU as such, the power usage is quite low, with a power draw of around 12.5 watts when the DAS is sitting idle and the hard drives have gone into sleep mode. This was with a fully loaded D8 Hybrid with four hard drives and four SSDs. The WD Red Plus drives used for testing have a standby power draw of 0.3 watts and with the D8 Hybrid itself drawing around 5–6 Watts when powered up empty, we can also see that the D8 Hybrid doesn't allow the SSDs to go into power saving mode, even after an extended idle period. This is most likely a limitation of the USB to NVMe bridge chips, but it's nonetheless disappointing to see on a modern piece of hardware. Since we're talking about SSDs here this shouldn't affect the lifespan of the drives significantly, but it does waste a bit of power.

With the hard drives spinning we saw a pretty steady power draw of 20.8 watts and once we started to copy some data to the two drives in RAID 0, this went up to around 25 Watts. Finally, we ran multiple instances of CrystalDiskMark on the individual drives and saw an average power draw of around 33 watts, peaking at a bit over 34 watts at times. As the WD Red Plus drives draw 4.7 watts each when in use, this is in line with what we expected to see. This is also largely due to the SSDs not hampering the power draw figures, as they're using the expected amount of power when in use.

Noise

The 120 mm fan is made by Shenzhen Yongyihao Electronics Co., Ltd which sells its fans under the SnowFan brand. The fan model is YY12025L12S, but we were unable to find the specific model on the company website. In use, the fan was quiet and in general drowned out by the hard drive noise. We never noticed the fan spinning up during the time we tested the D8 Hybrid—apart from when powering on the device—which suggests that TerraMaster has fixed the fan speed. As you can see from the noise graph above, we're talking about a very quiet device, as the microphone of the noise meter was placed just above the rear fan of the D8 Hybrid. During normal operation, the noise changes were barely noticeable at about a meter away, but the noise meter obviously picked up the constant changes in hard drive noise when data was written to all four drives simultaneously. The peak noise measurement was only a few seconds long at the most and was again due to the hard drives changing pitch and not due to the fan.

Temperature

The D8 Hybrid doesn't have any kind of built-in temperature sensor, but thanks to the temperature sensors in the WD Red Plus drives, we know that the drives idle at between 26 and 28 degrees C, depending on their location inside the DAS. The drive temperatures didn't increase significantly during use, seeing only a one to two degree increase in temperature during the game copy test. It's possible that more intense disk writes would increase the temperature a further couple of degrees, but this is still well within the expected operating temperature of the drives. The M.2 NVMe drives are a little trickier, as software like CrystalDiskInfo won't show them. However, HWiNFo64 had no issue finding the NVMe drives and allowed us to get some temperature readings. Here we did see a much higher temperature increase, but due to the 10 Gbps USB 3.2 Gen 2 interface being a massive bottleneck for the NVMe SSD, the temperature stayed well within reasonable levels, increasing from 18 degrees C at idle, to 43 degrees C at the end of the game copy test.