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More TOS 5 Adventures; More Drive Bays (Part 4)

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In part 3 we fully populated the F4-223 with four drives. A deliberate mish-mash of wildly different capacities to test the limits of what Terramaster’s asymmetric TRAID system makes possible. Not particularly recommended, but it works well: at the time of writing, over the last couple of months this configuration has given us a consistently reliable network-attached storage of just over 7TB. Yes, we’re wasting the talents of that last 22TB Seagate IronWolf Pro we… Now read on…

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More TOS 5 Adventures; More Drive Bays (Part 3)

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At the conclusion of part 2 we left the Terramaster F4-223 with a new drive in the fourth bay that we were unable to incorporate into our storage pool. This meant that we couldn’t build a volume on it and therefore couldn’t use to house our data. A NAS isn’t a toaster or a pencil sharpener, one of those appliances that is supposed to “just work”. There is a brand of computer that sometimes claims… Now read on…

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Listening for the Silent Killer: Part 2, The Withings BPM Core

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In part 1 we looked at a low cost blood pressure (hypertension) monitor from Emporia, typical of its class and built around commodity components. As such, it represents a revolution in home health care, enabling anyone of relatively modest means easily to keep an eye on this important health parameter. How important? The World Health Organisation estimates that worldwide about 1.28 billion adults between the ages of 30 and 79 have hypertension. And nearly half… Now read on…

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More TOS 5 Adventures; More Drive Bays (Part 2)

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It’s time for some drive expansion. We left the Terramaster F4-223 in part one with just two of the bays populated with a  pair of 1 TB drives. But we’re using the BTRFS file system and have chosen Terramaster’s TRAID asymmetric RAID configuration. If we’d chosen to use any of the conventional RAID configurations, to increase the size of our storage pool we would have had to fill the remaining two empty drives bays with… Now read on…

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Listening for the Silent Killer: Part 1, The Emporia BP51

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If you take any notice of these things (or even if you don’t) May is International Blood Pressure Month. It’s here to remind us of a key factor in our health. Tested Technology has written up TENS machines and breathalysers as well as hearing aids and smart watches. But this is one important class of medical equipment we haven’t yet discussed. Blood pressure monitors that can be had for just a few tens of pounds… Now read on…

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More TOS 5 Adventures; More Drive Bays (Part 1)

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Our review of the Terramaster 2-bay NAS and its TOS operating system at the end of last year concluded with our plan to graduate to a 4-bay Terramaster NAS. Among other things, this would allow us to explore the novel flexible drive array system the company calls TRAID. The Chinese manufacture has now very generously donated its newest model, the F4-223 and we’ve spent many weeks exploring its possibilities.  Donations of this kind enable us… Now read on…

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Reyee RG-E5: Plain (but not so Simple) Wi-Fi 6E

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The Reyee RG-E5 is an economically-priced, dual-band wireless router equipped to handle the latest Wi-Fi features. It lacks bells and whistles (no facility to add network-shared USB printers or storage) which might be an inhibitor for some elementary LAN installations. But most of today’s printers have their own networking capability and network-shared storage is usually very much better catered for by a dedicated NAS. The crucial feature of the RG-E5 is that it uses the… Now read on…

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The TerraMaster 2-bay NAS Meets Seagate’s New Massive drives (part 3)

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Up until version 5 of its NAS operating system, Terramaster appeared to be concentrating on the hardware side of the business. Its machines are well-built and designed to last. The software, though, was basic, lacking applications and no match for the Taiwanese offerings from QNAP and Synology. TOS 5 changes all that. The new version of the operating system has sweeping ambitions. Transcoding movies, running AI on photo collections to do automatic categorising, offering a… Now read on…

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The TerraMaster 2-Bay NAS meets Seagate’s New Massive Drives (part 2)

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At the end of June, Terramaster finally released its first production version of TOS 5, the operating system for the Terramaster series of network attached storage (NAS) devices. In part 1 of this review we discussed our early dabbling with the “Insider Preview” version of TOS 5. It was our hope that with the arrival of the production version the reservations about Terramaster we listed in part 1 would evaporate. This is largely what has happened.  The… Now read on…

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The TerraMaster 2-Bay NAS meets Seagate’s New Massive Drives (part 1)

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Tested Technology has a couple of entry-level two-Bay NAS devices, sent to us by the Chinese manufacturer, Terramaster. Why two? Although the two machines are almost physically identical, one—the F2-210—is ARM-based while the other—the F2-221—uses an Intel x86 processor. Functionally they’re very similar, both using TerraMaster’s Linux-based TOS operating system. One difference is power consumption, the F2-210 being rather more economical on juice (see section Power Consumption below). There’s also a big difference in the… Now read on…