Apparently the H8 Hybrid drives can be passed through to the OS (say Tarramaster TOS) and software RAID can then be configured. If so it’s not a bad USB 3.2 Gen 2 expansion device at ~$200 USD. Keep in mind that Synology Expansion units don’t use hardware RAID either and cost much more (~$500 USD). Tarramaster should probably ship the H8 with Windows and MacOS software for RAID configuration but IMO it’s still a good deal at the Kickstarter price.
I use the D8 Hybrid for my HDD array with an HP Deskpro Mini 600 Unraid system. Works well, but I think the power consumption is a bit to high. Even compared with the Terramaster D5-300C which I used before, it needs 6-7 W more.
The threaded insert the screw goes into seems to be permanently attached, with no easy way to remove it. While the cooling holes for the drives seem to be in the right spot for smaller sizes, there isn't a easy way to use them.
your opinion of this for a movie & tv show plex server library via a 2012 mac mini? i’m currently simply using an external 14tb seagate drive backed up w/carbon copy cloner on another external 14tb seagate. thanks for your videos.
I think it could work fine in this use case with a Mac mini. A few things I'd note are the 2012 Mac mini only has 5gbit USB link, so that will limit max speeds. Also if your not using the M.2 slots I'd look at other options that are HDD only.
@@ElectronicsWizardry thank you. what model would you suggest if i don’t need the m.2 slots on this D8 model? how about the QNAP TR-004 4 Bay USB Type-C Direct Attached Storage (DAS) with hardware RAID?
ZFS should work fine without trim as to my knowledge ZFS only uses trim with the zpool trim action, and doesn't affect data stored on disk. But the performance impact of no trim may be significant depending on the drive.
no rim is a big thing! also, yes, why onlu 2 drive raid O.o seems like they got "spare part" around and build something... usefull for, like said, grouping the disk around that you don't use
I ponder if the RAID chip is cheaper than another USB hub chip? Using just 2 USB hub chips they ended up with an odd amount of ports to attach the even amount of drives to.
Maybe a use case could be limiting the use of pcie lanes? Would these be limited by this device to the lanes taken by the one usb port you are connecting to? Or am I wrong there?
Since USB is used for the drives instead of PCIe, it wouldn't use any PCIe lanes, and this can be nice for adding drives to a system that doesn't have the lanes/slots to do so. The max bandwidth would be slower than if PCIe was used directly, but in many workloads a USB SSD is plenty fast.
@Reddepex this really depends on how the usb controller is connected to the rest of the system. Often usb is integrated onto the chipset of cpu so no lanes are used. One other thing to note is the usb controller uses the same amount of lanes if a device is connected or not so adding a drive like this one won’t use more lanes than the empty port in most configurations.
Good review once again. Something like that I suppose might be cool indeed for something like NUC running OMV or something like that. I've always been curious about these kind of solutions that do they have any capasitors inside? I mean I see high risk in accidental connection errors. Can they flush cache (if there's any) to drives before powering down. Obviously it's bad case already, but I kinda suspect that these solutions might be even more failure prone in data recovery if something like that happens as there is after all those "so to say converters" inside. Does anyone have first hand experience about these situations?
There is no visible power less capacitors on this board. Since there are no additional RAM on these USB converter chips, there is likely very little data stored on here other than a minimal data buffer. One other data loss concern is if they handle sync requests correctly. I didn't check this in my testing, but I have seen some USB drives that appear to fake the sync commands, but can't comment on this specific enclosure. I'd like to look more into how devices handle unexpected power outages and data loss, but need to plan a methodology to do it correctly. Let me know if you have any ideas about how this can be done well. These converts don't put any extra formatting data on the drives, so you can plug them directly to a motherboard and mount the exact same filesystem and data.
@@ElectronicsWizardry that was interesting to hear about the possibility of that sync issue. Never heard of it or noticed activity on my removable drives after sync completion. Reliable or maybe better said comparable testing of these problems is I suppose virtually impossible. I don't know if it's possible to run like script that sync's and right after completion would essentially hard reset that usb interface? But for like realife writing to drive and essentially simulating powerloss or something, can't think of any method to compare between devices. Good point btw that it would be possible to recover data from drive in computer. Indeed on that regard it should be virtually identical to recover data from device like that or internal drive, stupid me. Also iirc quite many ssd's have internals designed that in case powerloss they flush cache before circuitry runs out of power. Should actually check out of curiosity that in what kind of "bursts" data is transmitted via controllers and if there are any safeties involved. I'd suppose there has to be some "check bits" involved in transmission. Though it goes so deep that I'll likely dropout very early on when looking into this kind of stuff 😀
Agreed. FYI I contacted TerraMaster support over chat on their website. They said the unit now supports TRIM, including the units being sold on Kickstarter.
Why don't you give him suggestions on subjects on Proxmox you would like to see? There is only so much that can be said about a software. The man gotta eat.
Apparently the H8 Hybrid drives can be passed through to the OS (say Tarramaster TOS) and software RAID can then be configured. If so it’s not a bad USB 3.2 Gen 2 expansion device at ~$200 USD. Keep in mind that Synology Expansion units don’t use hardware RAID either and cost much more (~$500 USD). Tarramaster should probably ship the H8 with Windows and MacOS software for RAID configuration but IMO it’s still a good deal at the Kickstarter price.
I use the D8 Hybrid for my HDD array with an HP Deskpro Mini 600 Unraid system. Works well, but I think the power consumption is a bit to high. Even compared with the Terramaster D5-300C which I used before, it needs 6-7 W more.
Excellent review! Loved the power consumption scenarios! 😀
It looks like you could move the screw and socket for the NVMe drive up and use the holes maybe to latch down the smaller drive.
Maybe im wrong..
The threaded insert the screw goes into seems to be permanently attached, with no easy way to remove it. While the cooling holes for the drives seem to be in the right spot for smaller sizes, there isn't a easy way to use them.
your opinion of this for a movie & tv show plex server library via a 2012 mac mini? i’m currently simply using an external 14tb seagate drive backed up w/carbon copy cloner on another external 14tb seagate. thanks for your videos.
I think it could work fine in this use case with a Mac mini. A few things I'd note are the 2012 Mac mini only has 5gbit USB link, so that will limit max speeds. Also if your not using the M.2 slots I'd look at other options that are HDD only.
@@ElectronicsWizardry thank you. what model would you suggest if i don’t need the m.2 slots on this D8 model? how about the QNAP TR-004 4 Bay USB Type-C Direct Attached Storage (DAS) with hardware RAID?
Because it cant trim, would that mean that using the drives in ZFS would cause problems ?
ZFS should work fine without trim as to my knowledge ZFS only uses trim with the zpool trim action, and doesn't affect data stored on disk. But the performance impact of no trim may be significant depending on the drive.
How about reviewing Nutanix vs Proxmox?
no rim is a big thing! also, yes, why onlu 2 drive raid O.o seems like they got "spare part" around and build something... usefull for, like said, grouping the disk around that you don't use
I ponder if the RAID chip is cheaper than another USB hub chip?
Using just 2 USB hub chips they ended up with an odd amount of ports to attach the even amount of drives to.
Maybe a use case could be limiting the use of pcie lanes? Would these be limited by this device to the lanes taken by the one usb port you are connecting to? Or am I wrong there?
Since USB is used for the drives instead of PCIe, it wouldn't use any PCIe lanes, and this can be nice for adding drives to a system that doesn't have the lanes/slots to do so. The max bandwidth would be slower than if PCIe was used directly, but in many workloads a USB SSD is plenty fast.
@@ElectronicsWizardry Thanks for answering! And wasn't aware that usb controllers do not take any pcie lanes. Learned that now.
@Reddepex this really depends on how the usb controller is connected to the rest of the system. Often usb is integrated onto the chipset of cpu so no lanes are used. One other thing to note is the usb controller uses the same amount of lanes if a device is connected or not so adding a drive like this one won’t use more lanes than the empty port in most configurations.
Good review once again. Something like that I suppose might be cool indeed for something like NUC running OMV or something like that. I've always been curious about these kind of solutions that do they have any capasitors inside? I mean I see high risk in accidental connection errors. Can they flush cache (if there's any) to drives before powering down. Obviously it's bad case already, but I kinda suspect that these solutions might be even more failure prone in data recovery if something like that happens as there is after all those "so to say converters" inside. Does anyone have first hand experience about these situations?
There is no visible power less capacitors on this board. Since there are no additional RAM on these USB converter chips, there is likely very little data stored on here other than a minimal data buffer. One other data loss concern is if they handle sync requests correctly. I didn't check this in my testing, but I have seen some USB drives that appear to fake the sync commands, but can't comment on this specific enclosure.
I'd like to look more into how devices handle unexpected power outages and data loss, but need to plan a methodology to do it correctly. Let me know if you have any ideas about how this can be done well. These converts don't put any extra formatting data on the drives, so you can plug them directly to a motherboard and mount the exact same filesystem and data.
@@ElectronicsWizardry that was interesting to hear about the possibility of that sync issue. Never heard of it or noticed activity on my removable drives after sync completion. Reliable or maybe better said comparable testing of these problems is I suppose virtually impossible. I don't know if it's possible to run like script that sync's and right after completion would essentially hard reset that usb interface? But for like realife writing to drive and essentially simulating powerloss or something, can't think of any method to compare between devices. Good point btw that it would be possible to recover data from drive in computer. Indeed on that regard it should be virtually identical to recover data from device like that or internal drive, stupid me. Also iirc quite many ssd's have internals designed that in case powerloss they flush cache before circuitry runs out of power. Should actually check out of curiosity that in what kind of "bursts" data is transmitted via controllers and if there are any safeties involved. I'd suppose there has to be some "check bits" involved in transmission. Though it goes so deep that I'll likely dropout very early on when looking into this kind of stuff 😀
Wait , no trim command for nvme 😮 wtf
Agreed. FYI I contacted TerraMaster support over chat on their website. They said the unit now supports TRIM, including the units being sold on Kickstarter.
Thanks for that update. Glad they fixed one of my biggest complaints with the unit.
It may be of use to console gamers?
No trim / unmap is a non starter. Definitely need heatsinks for the NVMe drives Overall doesn't seem well thought out
you should try to be an actor, you'll get bad guy parts but who cares $$$
I wish this channel will continue to provide usable information about Proxmox and not become a product review channel.
Why don't you give him suggestions on subjects on Proxmox you would like to see? There is only so much that can be said about a software. The man gotta eat.
Good idea
Shave your head. You have the jawline to pull it off