Category: Storage

We concluded part 4 with all four of the F4-223 NAS’s drive bays populated and a very respectable total of around 22TB of securely redundant storage. “Redundant” means that any one of these drives can fail and we should be able to recover all our data. We also mentioned in passing that although the F4-223 is more than adequate for its primary function as a network storage device, its hardware limitations unfortunately won’t allow us to… Now read on…

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…

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…

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…

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…

I’m about to contradict myself. This is an interesting experiment for me and one I hope you’ll feel the same way about. In our earlier review of the Synology entry level DS119j I wrote confidently: The single drive isn’t technically a limitation on capacity—the DS119j’s specs allow for a drive as large as Toshiba’s magnificent helium-sealed MG07ACA14TE. Yes, that’s 14TB. But even if you can stump up the necessary £550, this is not an upgrade… Now read on…

In the first part of this review, we covered the DS119j hardware, how to install the operating system and some of the niceties of its power consumption. But at this point, you probably want to know what you can actually do with the thing. The short answer is: quite a lot. But—and this is crucial— not all at once. DSM? MY EXPERIMENTS WITH THE DS119j raised some doubt about what the three letters of the… Now read on…

We’re all having to run local area networks (LANs) these days. Back in the last century, our IT life tended to be based around our PC. Or maybe a pair of PCs, with the odd items of data initially being swapped between them via floppy disks. Techies call this Sneakernet. As the century wore to a close, we started joining our devices together. At first, using wire—Ethernet cable. But by the time laptops became ubiquitous,… Now read on…