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

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…

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

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…

Getting Up to Date with QNAP’s QTS part 2

One of my very first confessions to you when I started this QNAP saga nearly three and a half years ago was that I knew I was biting off much more than I could chew. Specifically, I wrote: “this might be the toughest review I’ve ever tackled…” not just because of the far-reaching operational scope of the device, but also because “…the Taiwanese manufacturers behind the TS-451 haven’t been content to put this thing on… Now read on…

Buffalo TeraStation 3200

Japanese-owned Buffalo was an early pioneer of network-attached storage (NAS). You can always tell the pioneers, as the old industry joke has it, by the arrows in their backs—the arrows in this case having been fired by later arrivals to the NAS game, notably Synology and QNAP, two Taiwanese manufacturers that have been eating the Japanese company’s market share. Buffalo has recently been making a push to win back lost ground with updated versions of its… Now read on…

Mac Backup Guru 2.0

Mac Backup Guru 2.0 is designed to be as simple to use as Apple’s Time Machine, but as reliable and powerful as products like Carbon Copy Cloner and SuperDuper. What’s wrong with Time machine you may ask…if you’ve never tried to retrieve something from it. As clever as it is, it isn’t quite the rock solid reliable backup option you might think. It’s very slow to use, and the backups it does do,  fail to… Now read on…