Terramaster

[Drezha]

Anyone had any experience with Terramaster products?

Debating on an external storage box but debating if the additional cost is worth going for the QNAP version.

Part of me is thinking the QNAP one will be the better purchase, purely from the “named brand” aspect and possibly worth the extra £30. I did think of going for the cheaper 4 bay Terramaster D4-300 as it’s cheaper than the two bay but think I only need two bays!

They look to have similar speeds – 469MB/s read for QNAP, 410MB/s for Terramaster, so I don’t think that plays much in to the decision making.

"Everything looks interesting until you do it. Then you find it’s just another job" - Terry Pratchett

[Dave Rice]

Watch those headline speeds, that’s with SSHD drives so there’s caching taking place AND its RAID 0!

Regular HDDs and RAID 1 you’ll be no faster than a cheap Synology over Gigabit.

 

[Drezha]

I had noted it was SSD in RAID 0, so I was wary of that. However, I wasn’t going to be using RAID at all, so perhaps it just makes sense to hang USB drives off the PC instead. However, see the Ryzen thread for removing drives from enclosures to free up plug sockets!

I don’t really want my modelling software writing data across the network whilst it’s working. Transferring at the end is fine, but ideally not during. Steam games as well won’t work nicely over the network (but at least those I can redownload again).

"Everything looks interesting until you do it. Then you find it’s just another job" - Terry Pratchett

[Dave Rice]

If it needs a main socket then you’re into the same sort of costs as the Terramaster, even a SATA enclosure is that sort of £.

With regards external USBs, I use them for local Synology backups. No problems with Toshiba and Maxtor 1 & 2 TB (Canvio basics are my go to) but I’ve had two 4TB Seagates fail on me after 15 months. It was a chunky case and felt like it had 2 x drives in it.

EDIT – I’ll see if I can find the 4TB and get it opened up.

[Drezha]

I did some tests last night and some reading – now I have a DS220+ heading my way. It’ll replace my DS116.

Influenced by the tests, the virtual machine manager and the fact that eBay is offering £1 listing this weekend so I can clear out some of the kit it’ll replace… I think also realising that I’d have to mess about with different apps to replace the Synology ones on my phone etc caused me to reconsider.

Spending £330 to avoid spending another £25 for iTunes Match :good: :whistle:

In fairness, the Mac sale is funding the purchase. I’ve been far more productive on my Windows machine recently for work than I have using macOS :wacko:  When I did my PhD, it was the complete other way round and I spent most of last year wanting a Mac for the office – now I’ve been using it full time during lockdown, I’ve found Windows to be better!

"Everything looks interesting until you do it. Then you find it’s just another job" - Terry Pratchett

[Dave Rice]

I have the DS218+ and so does a customer. The Active Backup for Business really does the job and BTRFS global deduplication is currently running at 3x. 4TB of backups (2 x daily bare metal incremental, PCs have 2TB drives) is taking up only 1.3TB. The restore process is very easy too, it has been used in anger.

I’m using Moments to organize the photos and the face recognition / places / locations works amazingly well. I didn’t get on with MS Active Directory though and have now discounted it as a cheap way to do a Domain (365 for Business bought from MS is the way to do that with Azure AD).

I had no problems using a third party 8GB Sodimm to take the ram out to 10GB. It does use 2.3GB in everyday tasks, 1GB of that is the VMs. 7GB is being used to cache *something* and there is no swap. The customer has left his at 2GB though and it seems to run just as fast. I suspect that like Windows it makes some sort of use of whatever it can get it’s hand on just in case.

[Drezha]

I’ll see how I get on with the Moments. When I tried it previously, I wasn’t to impressed, but I often used Photos on the Mac. However, I’ve not found an equal to Photos so far, so I installed Moments on my current NAS to try before hand but with the speed of indexing, I decided to wait.

I’ve got a 4GB SODIMM lying around from my HP upgrade, so I’ll put that in as the extra RAM and will be using BTRFS. I’m interested in trying the virtual machine or Docker support to get Pi Hole running, so that will come in handy and take a Pi off the network.

I considered the 218+ but the 220+ was £25 more, so it seemed silly not to get the newer one.

"Everything looks interesting until you do it. Then you find it’s just another job" - Terry Pratchett

[Ed P]

My #1 son brain-washed me into thinking that Macs were not bad bang/buck values. However even he is now questioning this attitude. I think it may be possible that the $2 Trillion valuation has feet of clay. It isn’t surprising that Trump has attacked Apple phone’s Chinese competitors!

[Dave Rice]

It will default to BTRFS and SHR.

I use VMM for my PiHole / DHCP server, Docker is probably better but I can’t get my head around it.

Photo indexing / thumbnail creation is a lot faster than with the ARM CPUs but still takes a while. Mind you I did dump 30GB on it in one go. The upload process to Moments is a lot easier than Photo Station, more like every other photo app out there.

[Drezha]

Haven’t had a chance to set it up yet – we hired a carpet cleaner for the weekend and still waiting for the office to dry now. Last one I set up was the DS418 for my old workplace for storing our modelling data on. That was setup using EXT4 and SHR from memory, though why I went for EXT4, I can’t remember but did use SHR, so that drives could be expanded at a later date.

This one I’ll be operating as two seperate disks I think – not after RAID 1, I’ll have backups elsewhere is the plan.

Once I’ve done the initial upload, expecting it to to be a while, but after that, should be fine I guess. Still undecided if I’ll use Synology Drive or if I’ll stick with my tried and tested Resilo Sync, considering that is easily installed.

I’ll have to look at the indexing, as my 116 seems to have stopped doing it automatically, I’ll manually have to run it for it to recognise new music in DS Audio or photos in Photostation – potentially due to Resilo adding them in I guess? :scratch:

"Everything looks interesting until you do it. Then you find it’s just another job" - Terry Pratchett

[Dave Rice]

Could be. I’ve been using Drive here and a few places. Most of my SMBs are still using mapped drives.

[Drezha]

Thinking about it, it cant be just the Resilio issue, as I use a mapped drive for my shared folder, and it doesn’t pick up TV or films that are added. Maybe I’ve turned out daily indexing – I’ll have to check, but as the 116 is now on eBay, I’ll just make sure the 220+ has it setup!

"Everything looks interesting until you do it. Then you find it’s just another job" - Terry Pratchett

[Dave Rice]

This is the default setting:

[Drezha]

Curses!

220+ doesn’t recognise the 4GB DDR I’ve installed. Not sure if it’s related to the fact that the RAM I’ve added is DDR4 2400MHz – a bit of digging suggests it’s 2600MHz installed by default, so I’ve grabbed myself a Crucial stick online to try (it’s £16). Don’t want to pay the £95 for the Synology RAM really! :wacko:

First drive is being checked currently and will the start the data transfer. :yahoo:

"Everything looks interesting until you do it. Then you find it’s just another job" - Terry Pratchett

[Drezha]

Pi Hole looks to be up and running within minutes using Docker. Followed the instructions here and was up and running very quickly. I assume it works, but I haven’t switched my DNS and DHCP servers to it yet, but the web portal is working.

Spent ages trying to get it working with the virtual machine. Downloaded Raspberry Pi OS, as I quite like it on the desktop but after install, it wouldn’t boot to a GUI (Or to a terminal in fairness!) I could have tried another distro but I’m up and going – will try moving it across later.

"Everything looks interesting until you do it. Then you find it’s just another job" - Terry Pratchett

[Dave Rice]

I just used Ubuntu server, that’s all I ever use for Intel CPU VMs. I don’t see the point in a GUI for this sort of work. Once you’re set up all you normally do is sudo apt update / upgrade every now and again. I have auto updates set up for Ubuntu itself.

[Drezha]

I got used to using the GUI on the Pi, as I’d often remote in from the iPad to use apps that didn’t run on the iPad itself. Also saves booting up a PC to do a quick task.

At the minute, debating if I need to set up a VM – did try Debain server using the netinstall disc last night and that worked a treat, but Pi Hole is working in docker, with a lower overhead.

It’s there to play with anyhow. :good:

"Everything looks interesting until you do it. Then you find it’s just another job" - Terry Pratchett

[Dave Rice]

I must get around to using docker.

[Drezha]

I’m still getting my head around it – I’m yet to try another in anger as I’m not sure I’ve got much need for anything else that Synology doesn’t already provide!

There’s a lot of piracy related ones (Sickbeard, Sonarr etc) but these can also be downloaded from Synocommunity as apps if that’s preferred (Synocommunity also offer a lot of other, decent, non piracy related items!). I guess the perks of docker is quicker updates.

Managed to resolve my issues with my Sonos yesterday. Sonos wanted me to edit the registry to allow me to connect a music library. It turns out I needed to change the minimum Samba protocol to v1, which isn’t noted on the Sonos site at all when you get the error. :negative:

When I hooked it up to the network switch and was transferring data to it, was going at ~111MBps, so I was happy with that. Beat the 30MBps I was getting over wifi. Maybe at some point I’ll wire the house, but for now, it’ll do with wifi access now that everything is on the drive.

"Everything looks interesting until you do it. Then you find it’s just another job" - Terry Pratchett

[Ed P]

Drezha wrote:

It turns out I needed to change the minimum Samba protocol to v1

That does not sound very sensible of Sonos. Samba v1 is from the days of DOS and is now known to be highly insecure.

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