What Do You Actually Get in a $700 NAS??? - Terra Master T6-423 Review
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- Опубліковано 12 кві 2023
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Mini NAS Appliances... the miniature servers you see in every SOHO, Real Estate Office, Law Firm and Dentist Clinic, but are they actually worth buying? The Terra Maser T6-423 sits right in the middle of the pricing spectrum when it comes to 6-Bay Self-Hosted NAS Appliances, but what are you actually getting for $700, and are they worth it?
But first... What am I drinking???
Probably the finest example of an English/Irish Style Red Ale brewed anywhere in the colonies, it's the Graveyard in the Pacific from North Jetty Brewing, a 10% Imperial Red Ale. This isn't an IPA....
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The issue with these Celerons with QuickSync is that it works great for basic video transcoding, but there’s a bunch of cases where applications like Plex will still need to utilize software transcoding. I used to run my Plex server on a dual core Pentium Gold and had no issues transcoding most content with multiple streams, but the moment you have any strange codecs like certain subtitle formats that need to be burned in or audio that is unsupported on the client, software transcoding needs to happen, and these CPU’s can’t handle that for a single stream. Then you factor in things like analyzing library content (video preview thumbnails, intro and credit detection, commercial detection, etc.) that all use the CPU instead of QuickSync.
But thats stuff you only do once. Same for your library. If its such a mess of different codecs that you cant do the trancoding in the system you have, then its time to statically re encode your library to a format thats transcodable for your system (which is somehting you should do anyway).
I aggree on the subtitles and audio part, but I can't remember the last time i needed subtitles and I usually also have differen audiostreams available for that reason.
I think on the whole, encoding and decoding with Plex/Emby/Jellyfin is akin to rocket science.
I am battling with stuttering and artefacts on my mediacenter PC. Used to run Linux on there, tried switching to Windows, had a Pentium CPU, switched to a 4th gen Core i5, hoping it had the better iGPU.
So far, Jellyfin just doesn't want to behave.
Granted, all the media servers seem to be utter enthusiast projects. Plex monetized it but the developers are just crap. Sorry, but they tack on features and don't care one bit about usability or what the customers want.
Jellyfin, it feels like, has one guy who's a father of six behind it. The DB is a right mess and whatever works you thank god because it's divine intervention :D.
If it wasn't for tracking what has been watched by whom, I'd just use VLC directly on the files, honestly.
Is software transcoding so bad on these? we ran a jellyfin server on 12 year old xeons (two Xeon X5680) and they had no problems software transcoding 2-3 streams at the same time the 24 threads seemed to help as we made it so jellyfin could take as much threads as it wanted so a 1 hour movie was fully transcoded in a matter of seconds.
@@FlaxTheSeedOne Pre-baking in this context means either giving up storage space at a rate of 1.5 to 2.3 times the storage space over JUST keeping the originals (assuming you go to h.264 using FFMPEG for re-encoding) or giving up your original copies and still potentially ending up losing storage space.
Honestly, anything promoting "Plex support" without either a stout APU al-la Vega 12 or better, or a 75w 16x PCIe slot (single- or double-width) and Nouveau support, should be considered false advertising. "Plex Compatible" maybe, but without realtime transcode it's doesn't really "Support" Plex.
Shoutout to my dog for today's attire. She really went the extra mile to make sure people knew I had a dog.
I always thought you just had cats
I've got a tortoise too.
I also had no idea you had a dog, or tortoise 🐢
I really hope the ToS is good. Also the TOS
hello CraftDog
I own North Jetty Brewing and someone just sent us this link. Thank you so much and we're glad you like Graveyard of the Pacific 🍻
So glad I built my own NAS in 2018 out of a thrown away server and hot-swap 3.5" drive bays I got on sale for $10 each, and its still running today.
Great review!
Software is the differentiator on devices like this, but even the hardware is lacking in this case. Thanks for an honest review.
The hardware seems to be decent and I really like the compact form factor. If you can put TrueNAS on this and upgrade to 16GB of RAM this could be a great little machine.
My TrueNAS box uses an atom J4205 and has no problem with gigabit sequential transfers, so it sounds like a problem with Terramaster's OS and not the speed of the hardware.
Might even be OS setup. Since it boots from spinning rust even journaling can hurt performance if the box is trying to read and write at the same time. Hell, I wonder if they even have "noatime" in fstab.
I find the N5095 very capable so I think something went wrong also. even the J4xxx as you said
not sure about this model or TrueNAS but I've got unRaid running on a 4 bay Terramaster, easy install. And since I used a new USB for this I've still got the factory install OS available if I want.
My use case is primarily as a data store not lots of real time access so performance issues with transfer rates or transcoding just are a nonissue for me
Sounds overpriced, based on what you can get with custom build systems.
My custom build nas was around 500 USD, it has 8 sata ports and 10Gbps SFP+ ...
It's connected through SFP+ to my switch, all other computers are connected through 2.5Gbps ethernet to the same switch.
Most clients get transfer speeds between 200MBps, up to 270MBps ...
Best part about the terramaster devices is that you can swap the USB key for a larger one and distro hop on them. I use redhat on mine.
Nice work
i love that linode add
I love North Jetty brewing and go almost every time I am in Seaview/Longbeach (I say almost as I missed it this past weekend for the first time ever) The size of the brewery compared to how much they make and how far the beer is distributed is amazing.
Thank you 🫶
You did mention installing TrueNAS, that should be an ' opportunity ' to look at the boot USB to see if it stores settings that could be cleared to let you change the drive settings easier than all that work.
I have heard of this brand of NAS, but I have never used it. The asking price for it is about average for its capabilities. But just like most other brands you will have to do upgrades to get the full capabilities out of it. So you would need to upgrade the ram and add NVME drives for caching.
As far as that problem goes of not being able to switch to a new RAID configuration. I had a Drobo brand NAS once where I had to do a factory reset to be able to use the device again after I just changed out the drives and wanted to start over. Not sure why, maybe somewhere it saves the info from the last RAID setup and it wants to try and recover it?
Great vid as always 👍
6:43 -- A lot o' small biz and homelabs oughta skip Raid. More economical and critical over time is to have one (or better yet, two) surplus pools for regularly backing up (whether distributed or converged). Set up as raid0 or no-raid without room used for parity. Raid foremost is a protective enhancement for high-avail enterprise h/w with no less than, say, 8 or 10 or 15 spinning drives. And sure, nand vs spinners makes a difference in layouts, too. Zfs specials (arc, metadata, zil) atop optane (or else consumer flash with goodly write caches) are good.
Kindest regards, neighbours and friends.
I've been running this device for quite a while, with TrueNAS and 32GB RAM. It is connected to the network via 802.3ad and I can't complain about the performance. It was just a little tricky to get the fan control working.
I put TrueNAS on a TerraMaster F4-423 and it was a pretty straightforward process. It's just been sitting for months not doing anything. Maybe I should find a use for it.
It would be useful if you could check a bit deeper the hardware configuration; some of their products use SATA port multipliers, which will limit performance for RAID, also the # of PCIe lanes for M.2 slots and Ethernet controllers might be underprovisioned, due to the low end CPU used and low budget target for the boards and components. Any of these design decisions cannot be solved by whatever OS and software you would use.
Drobo had a similar partitioning / RAID setup with their devices. I imagine a lot of CPU time is dedicated to handling writing striped data across multiple partitions and multiple drives.
the low transfer speeds seem more likely to be the terramaster software than anything else. the celeron is a 10w chip but it can totally max out a 2.5bge connection. traid seems attractive in terms of disk space savings, but i guess fidling around with all those partitions puts way too much load to the poor cpu with unnecessary parity calculations, that it chokes. that might also be the reason for the low transfer speeds.
Thanks for the very honest review! This device doesn't seem ready for prime-time though.
Craft computing videos:
Hardware review part < Beer review part
I am looking forward to seeing your review of this system with TrueNAS. Will you use both scale and core?
I keep my full-sized rack right in the entry way (it's actually in what used to be an open closet of sorts), so everyone knows what they are in for when the come over! (loud fans, they are in for loud fans)
That partitioning arrangement is similar to the way BTRFS arranges raid5 arrays. Instead of using partitions it uses internal blocks but the effect is the same. The advantage of BTRFS is that it can dynamically rearrange these blocks if you add more drives.
Also BTRFS won't waste the overhanging 2TB from the 10TB drive. As long as there is no single drive bigger than the sum of all other drives, all space can be utilized.
And why wouldn't it? It's really easy to come up with a drive pairing that won't waste space. I don't understand why btrfs is the only filesystem that can utilize all space is such a mismatched drive configuration.
@@turun_ambartanen my guess is that doing this in a way that enterprise use-cases which rely on data restores/resilvers (due to a drive loss for instance, but also adding drives) don't eventually end up screwing more drives because they have to perform huge data moving around. This moving around can either be across all drives or maybe even just overloading a single drive, which might be the larger one - i.e. the one that actually matters the most if it crashes, but even if it's the smaller drives, even if they don't get written a lot of resilvering, these would usually be your older (recycled) drives and more worn. thus susceptible to failure. There's a LOT of concerns on data integrity and this is both why ZFS has been the industry standard for decades, and why filesystems and storage formats end up taking SO MUCH from moving from beta to 1.0, and why even after that they take so long to be adopted by OS kernel devs
Drobo does a similar thing with their "beyond raid" technology. Those heads will work like crazy!
Shout out to Arsenal, been pretty happy with them for my home use drive needs.
For the price, Synology is by far the better option if just for their software which is fantastic.
That said all the off the shelf NAS units cost an arm and a leg for what you get and synology is the worst of that bunch by any measure.
Software is great. But the shit with only making their own drives verified on the higher-end systems is bullshit.
@@nadtz no it’s not. Especially for “normal” people who want plug and play. Their basic program suite has everything they need. No need to use docker containers. There’s also plenty of documentation for when they run into trouble.
The hardware is lower spec but that also means low power draw. Power users will want to build their own but that’s not what a lot of people want.
@@Bob_Smith19 That has nothing to do with the price. If it's not good cost to performance for 'power users' then it can't be good cost to performance for 'normal users'. I acknowledge there is a place for off the shelf stuff and use synology/qnap where appropriate but that doesn't mean it's good value.
@@nadtzwhy can’t it be good cost to performance? When someone wants a plug and play solution they are willing to pay more over DIY. Synology has actual support which is baked into the price. I’m not saying they aren’t “expensive”, but there is value there for a lot of people.
Their higher end products are in a completely different class in every aspect. It’s an apples to oranges comparison w/ the products designed for a home user.
actually a very nice array setup . Like mentioned, very good use of many different sized drives. sleek little box. small sadness with the performance.
Nice shirt! I've been a google junkie since day one. Im sure they have every piece of PII data on me possible.
Jeff -- what was your HDD configuration when you were running that test and under what RAID style selection? I'm wondering if using TRAID causes performance to suffer? TRAID sounds an awful lot like what Synology's SHR does.
I would try replacing the original usb with a Unraid usb or some other nas software and see if it performs any better
I wish there were a modern version of the good old HP Pro Liant N54L MicroServer.
I attempted to do a home media center with a small ATOM based system that had room for 4 3.5" drives. The ATOM CPU was a tad underpowered for what I wanted to do...leading to laggy operation of Kodi that I was using at the time.
Protip: the 16GB RAM limit on Intel's specs sheet for the 5095/5105 are not accurate.
While I didn't have 2 sticks of 16GB to really test it out, I didn't have any issues at using a 16GB and 8GB for a total of 24GB.
this reminds me why i have a 5.25" hotswap bay on my intel 13th gen build for data backups...
My two server racks are not normal in my game room? They do put out a hell of a lot of heat though. Next house I build I got to build a server room with that split unit AC dedicated for it
Anyone know something about Water Panther Admiral drives he has next to it the hole time? Hard to find much about what drives they are rebranding.
In 2023 one of the most important things to me is power consumption.
Please continue making those videos with similar devices (Synology, Qnap), so people like myself can select best device for themselves.
Curious, If the usb drive with TOS on it were to be put in another x86 system would it boot and install TOS?
would like to know if you can install unraid on this. It installs and boots from USB Drive.
For much less I was able to use the ASRock deskmeet b660 with a 12100 running truenas and all sata SSD storage with 15gb raw capacity for my home server, the alder lake chips are very good and low power draw if you don't want to include a GPU, premade nas units have never seemed like a good enough value to me
Proxmox can supposedly be installed on these. Would love to see TerraMaster U4-111 (10GB connectivity) running Ceph on Proxmox. Just a thought.
At first I was a bit sad that I bought an HPE Microserver G10+ as the Terra master is smaller/has more bays.
Finishing the video... im happy with my purchase. :)
No need to be sad. HPE Microserver G10+ is a wholly different beast.
a Microserver is a fully fledged server, this thing is an overpriced scam
love your t shirt lol
Maybe a little test? 64GB RAM and proxmox installation?
Please make a video/review while truenas is installed on this hardware :)
I agree, you should sell your own. Maybe Erying Motherboard with onboard CPU. If the MB and CPU sell for $140 to $160 and a large workstation case sells for $150, memory, power supply and SSD, should bring you to just over $500. And that retail pricing. If you can work out a good wholesale price, this could be a great product. Just have enough room for 15 drive or more. Just make the case free standing or rack mountable.
This is why I went with a used server. Picked up a used Dell T420 for under $300. I added 2x E5-2470V2 (for a total of 20 cores / 40 threads). Tossed in 24gb of ddr3 ram I had sitting around. I have a nice server for far under the price of an 8 bas NAS.
and you can add dual 10gb ethernet for very cheap
And idle power consumption? My R5 1600 + GTX 1050Ti + 4 3.5 WD Reds idles at 90W... that is a lot. It costs me like 40 Euros/month in just power
I'm sure apard did something similar, and put truenas or proxmox or both on a terramaster nas, fairly recently :)
TerraMaster still has a long way to go. I had an older unit that I ran for a while and when one of the drives failed (JBOD) I lost ALL of the data and files on them all and was unable to recover anything of use. All of my movies, all of my photos and also our wedding video, all gone. This prompted me to go the HomeLab route and run TrueNAS to make sure that everything was stored in redundancy where I am running 2 18TB Mirror VDEVs for a RAID10 style setup.
You got hit by that bug. Like I did that in correctly set up raid or jbod
Sorry for jumping back on a 9-month old comment - but you have separate backup copies of all your data, right? RAID should *never* be considered as a backup, it's meant to keep things running through drive failures (i.e. availability), but the chance for data loss is still there. It just sounds like you might be relying on a single possible point of failure too much. The rule of thumb is 3-2-1 for anything you consider critical - three separate copies of the data (the NAS counts as one for the purpose of this, even if its drives are internally mirrored), two types of storage, one set of copies offsite.
Getting it up is my problem too.
That kind of SBC with better CPU would be really interesting to hack into a proper 1RU form factor ;)
the real question -> What brand makes your eyeglasses?
I can't find anything with that short height lenses here, smallest i found feels like the lenses are huge
Try a Synology. I have one (920+) and don't have the sequential read/write issues you were seeing.
my only issue with teraastation devices is short firmware supp0rt in my recent experience. it tends to max out at 2 years. for the mney hardly worth it when synology is usually around 3-8 years across their devices.
I can see buying something like this for a business where you can write the cost off as a business expense. For myself at home though I'll setup something manually as I couldn't justify the cost.
NAS stuff is heavily overpriced for the hardware because you are paying for the software (and customer support on the software) as well. If you want real performance you need to pay a lot of money.
That said I really like the hardware design of this unit, the chassis that can be easily opened to upgrade it, the fact that it's mostly a metal box, and it's really compact. I'm wondering about airflow, but apart from that it looks better than average
So the odd can't choose raid option after first set up. Is a known bug. It been reported a lot on their forum's
Not getting the price markup on NAS... Low-end celeron, small SBC and a few slots for HDD... What's making them so EXPENSIVE ?
I'm gonna have to agree with you here, what is "peace and quiet"? Isn't it normal to have the equivalent of a jet engine going off in your apartment living room?
personally with a system of this hardware level I would likley go with unraid. I've had good luck with it on lower spec hardware
Is it just me, or does TerraMaster's logo look eerily like Cooler Master's?
Linus from LTT enters the chat..
So you heard about my latest corporate investment then?..
I'll tell you all about it as soon as the NDA is over and the product is launched.
Needless to say it's NAS related and it sounds like it might be interesting.
good guy Linus and his good guy ethical investments
Hi to all! Never heard of Arsenal disks, are they a refurb or actual original equipment?
Their was a thread on that on data horder awhile back on the topic
As someone with hearing loss as a result of working in a server room, I would side with your spouse on that one. It was an old turn of the century isp
Why do vendors sent out review units but not ask questions like how to reinit it
The prices for pretty much all dedicated consumer NASes are nuts. Even a simply 2 bay unit is over $300 most of the time. It is absolutely a space that needs some low cost disrupting.
You pay for the convenience. Not saying disruption wouldn’t help. But the price barrier is still low for someone that just wants a media server and backups for their other computers.
@@Bob_Smith19 A few years ago I would have agreed, developing a friendly easy to use OS for NAS applications isn't free.
But we're several years in, the R&D cost has been recouped IMHO. Considering the hardware you get you're paying probably 3X the BOM cost in some cases. It's time for a market disruption in this space.
@@repatch43 they had to buy more costly parts. Seeing chip shortage is still a issue for certain parts
@@vamwolf Ya, no, alot of that is bunk now, I'm very familiar with how the part shortage effected things, I'm in the industry, any company saying that today is either rather niche (and these NAS boxes are anything but niche) or it's bunk.
so is Traid doing the same as Unraid??
I don't often see people review equipment like this, and I've often been skeptical about how much the little celerons are actually capable of. My ML350 G9 that I use for a home server was rescued from a recycling bin for $50 and the promise to destroy the drives, "ok no problem man, I'll rip em out here and now and you can recycle the 2 300gb hard drives." I've since put 2 E5-2670v3s in it and 64gb of RAM and I still feel like it's lacking in some things I use it for, but at least these are things I can correct if I'm willing to invest in stronger chips, a better memory config, and a GPU. I can't find myself standing by single function non-upgradeable machines like this because you can't really pass it down the line to another function, and what you or I could throw together for $700 as a NAS would embarrass this little box. Even if you're going for low wattage systems there are those desktop boards from Erying or the ali-express laptop chips that have been made socketable.
Worked in small business IT, and had experience with most NAS brands, including Terra. I would absolutely not recommend them. When they fail, they fail spectacularly. I've seen some actually release smoke in the process. These days I swear by Synology. Ability to run VM's directly on the internal hardware? Oh, hell yeah! Excellent long term support. I have drives as old as 10 years that are still receiving updates.
Terra has one single benefit - cost. That's it. But I would not rely on them beyond the warranty period. Would not recommend WD either. For mechanical hard drives - anything but Seagate.
I like that you are wearing a shirt that smashes on google, on a platform owned by google. lol
Still debating on making a NAS or just buying one.
I use an old PC (Ryzen 2600, 16GB RAM) with 22TB of HD storage.
i still don't understand their scam, i did my NAS for less than 100(no disks ofc) bucks and used TrueNAS as the OS, gives plenty of room to spend on HDDs
I want your shirt.
I’m down for a truenas or unraid test
their OS spinning wheel is reflective of their website right now.
Today's reviews: NAS; meh it's okay. BEER: Hell yeah, this is what you are here for!
If it supports booting from USB, then you can likely use Unraid. Done…
If it follows the 220 and 420 models, you can remove the USB and insert another one with a bootable Windows Server and get a lowpower Server 2019 or other OS.
Yep! It's just an x86 PC, so installing your own system is entirely possible. TrueNAS might be in the cards for a future video.
I'm sure WS2022 really feels quite snappy with 4 GB of RAM! :)
Not worse than on Hyper-V with 4GB ;)
(and you can put 16 or afair 32GB RAM in the 220 )
Jeff, Would you consider having a look at the TerraMaster U4-423 as it's almost identical price but boasts a much better performance. Thanks !
lol.. hahahahah.. nice one!! u r awesome
Cheaper and better to get an matx case with hotswap bays and stuff your own hardware into it.
1000$ all in for a system much better. thanks to watching this channel and few others. built it over a year ago, and although it was not plug and play at all...I have the room to upgrade so many things about it. been working great since building it and installing tuuenas scale.
MoB - MACHINIST X99 MR9A PRO V2
CPU - Intel Xeon E5-2699 v3 2.3 GHz 45 MB 18 Core (LGA 2011) 64-bit
GPU - GeForce GTX 1060 3GB
RAM - Samsung 16GB (x2) PC4-2133 RDIMM DDR4-17000 ECC Registered
STORAGE DRIVE(S) - 3 x 8TB Seagate Barracuda + 120 GB SSD Log Drive) all in RAID Z.
PSU - Seasonic PRIME TX-750, 750W 80+ Titanium
BOOT DRIVE - 500GB Samsung NVME
CASE - Phanteks, Enthoo Pro
this TerraMaster box is meant for people who dont do all that. unfortunately this particular box did not deliver the right combination of power and value.
"I feel like I could bring something better to market" are you behind the NAS investment Linus has been teasing on and off on his podcasts?
truenas.....do it mang!
T-raid in concept sounds a bit like unraid
Looks just like Synology Web UI
Nice stuff, but that thing is WAY too expensive for what it does. For that money you can have a decent Synology or go full DIY with a full server with 8 places and loads of options.
If TrueNAS works on this, & I can run a minecraft server, I'd be really interested.
I've been tempted with a off the shelf NAS box vs my rather large unRAID server. However, I've heard horror stories of hardware failures that leave the array in tatters. I don't think I trust the long term reliability.
My Synology NAS runs perfectly fine for 10 years now. I don't get why people are always afraid of failures... You guys don't have backups or what?
@@d3nso_ I think it's because some brands are not quite up to Synology levels of reliability, or because of the way these devices work when it comes to low level repair. I recently had to fix a Buffalo NAS and it was a total PITA.
I have always been put off by OTS products like synology since gamersnexus had theirs fail and couldnt replace the proprietary PSU
@@mapesdhs597 Synology isn't the best as far as reliability goes, they have or had exploding PSUs and dying boards and whatever on some models.
If you want high reliability go for actual small server hardware like HP Microserver or DIY build with decent parts
@@marcogenovesi8570 It's the DIY option which intrigues me the most (see my longer solo post).
Buffalo may have "locked you in to one configuration" so that you could "recover the one bad drive" (data) not sure, thats a bit sad
A NAS is attractive but frankly it seems like I always have old parts/boxes to make such a thing for literally free (minus drives, which usually aren't included anyway) Who is actually buying these besides youtubers/streamers? I can't imagine blowing 700 dollars on one for myself. Also they should call that wacky raid config RAID Rainbow or something. Good to hear about that (wierd?) technology. Can the 2x NICs be teamed? might help out offices with managed switches at least but I guess if you can afford managed switches maybe not buying 700$ NAS units...
I find it kinda weird that this got any recommendation at all. It's priced the same as it's competition, but underperforms it's competition by a significant margin. And doesn't offer any advantages over the competition.
I don't need the distraction of maintaining a NAS server. The temptation to keep messing with the system would be counterproductive.
It is the cases. The cases have a "business" tax, easy of use tax, and custom OS tax.
Instead of TrueNAS how about open media vault 🤔
4GB? Yikes. I bought on stick of 16GB 1RX8 3200MT/S for 30 Euros yesterday.
Is terramaster affiliated with cooler master? They have nearly identical logos it's weird
I've always found it odd... But no, no relation.