Love the theory behind it but pricing is way off. Really love low power, small form factor, low noise and ease of use. BUT...the speed is not a premium here and honestly 2.5gig would be fine. My target price here is 350~400. Vendors need to stop believing that NVME is somehow more upscale....it's not.
Its the perenial problem with NASes. More PCIE lanes maeans a more powerful CPU. A more powerful CPU means more heat and cost. A more powerful CPU means more power used etc. An i3-N305 (9 lanes G3) is $309 tray price. Which is the top CPU in its TDP range. A brief look though the mindboggling list of Intel CPUs. The i3-1215U (20lanes G4/G3) is the closest in TDP and cost to the N305, but does not come in an embedded option. Then there is the P cores and E cores. N305 is eight E cores. The 1215U is 2P and 6E.
Exactly this. It's not like there aren't options out there that could actually power something like this (embedded Epyc or Epyc Siena for example) but it's going to cost a lot more and use substantially more power. That said I'll probably get a Siena setup in the long run for my NAS rebuild (starting out using a V5 Xeon) as it's probably the best performance per wt that also has enough PCIE lanes to support some U.2 drives.
At time 7:12, for btrfs, you can only take snapshots of subvolumes (and the root volume), not ordinary directories. Presumably, TOS is creating a subvolume when you create a shared directory with the GUI - hence the ability to version it with snapshots. The latest releases of OMV are also creating subvolumes for their shared directories when the underlying filesystem is btrfs.
Well it saturates the 10gbit ethernet port and 1 lane per ssd is all the small cpu can give...so i see no problem with the product? they could throw in a bigger cpu but that would mean higher costs, bigger form factor, more needed cooling, higher weight and noise etc. and still wouldnt be faster with a 10gbit ethernet connection, so perfect choice the way it is only problem i see is the price which feels a bit too steep.
Not actually sure how the SSD's being able to go faster will help given it's a single 10Gbit/s network interface. I doubt most people are copying files internally on the NAS itself. It would be interesting to put this up against a more traditional 6-8bay nas, Also what the fan noise is like when idle. There are other reasons to go SSD vs HDD noise being one of them, imagine this in the corner of a bedroom or living room (For people who don't have dedicated spaces for their office)
My next NAS needs to be quiet, cool, very low watts and able to fully saturate 10gb. I want to be able to run it full time, not hear it or have it heat up my office - all problems with my current units.
@@markmonroe7330 Put sata SSDs in any nas that has or where you can put a 10Gb card in and you are all set. HDDs also can easily saturate 10Gb in a raid configuration, but come with noise and a little extra power draw.
This just makes me think of the AsusStor FlashStor FS67-series that Patrick and his team from ServeTheHome covered almost a year ago. The 6-drive version is STILL priced at $449, albeit it only has dual 2.5 GbE for network connectivity, and also only has 4 GB of RAM (out of the box) along with an N5105 rather than the newer N305. The 12-drive version has a 10 GbE NIC, but the same processor and RAM, for the same price ($799) as this system. It's nice that these are starting to come down in price a little bit, but the lack of PCIe lanes means that you aren't really able to take full advantage of the NVMe SSDs that are being installed.
It's weird that it's transfering at only 5Gbit, I think the Asustor with an older CPU did better with 10Gbit. Maybe Terramaster is not doing any PCIe switching so that 10Gbit is just using one PCIe lane and that's it. Other than that I'd chuck the Terramaster software in the bin and use Truenas on it. The package is super interesting if there are no needs for loads of storage, space is low and power bills are high. Also 8 efficiency cores can run lots of self hosted services with ease.
It could be just overhead that's bringing down the whole chain. A x1 connection is not enough theoretical for 10Gbit, much lesd when a whole system is involved in it. Maybe under a better optimized OS might do a bit better but I wouldn't count on it. Still a nice to have instread of 2.5Gbit.
Excellent presentation. Thank you. On second thought, which one of the available NVMe NAS devices actually has the best 10gb performance with say 8-drives or 6, 4?
like most NASs figure out your use case, then find the one that matchs it. I will chime in here with a general Terrmaster comment. I've owned the original (?) F2-210 since 2020 and it just reliablly works since purchase. My use case is just an on network file archive as opposed to some file server I actually expect really good performance from. and for that it has been great.
Yeah for basic network sharing there is nothing wrong with terramaster. But with other competitors offering better software they need to keep up. I think they are doing that now with this release.
I never understood this concept, and this certainly isn't the only device to do it - Why provide room for high performance components when there is a bottleneck with some other part of the product. It's so silly because marketing and pricing for that product often doesn't reflect those limitations either.
I am not really sure if I am still coming for the reviews, or if I am just in for the snarky remarks :'D. Love your writing and presentation, seriously enjoy the humor :'D. Lets keep those snapshots were they are ;). Thanks for the laughs :)!
Did this guy just call me Gen3x1?? Wait until I subscribe and hit the bell to give him a piece of my mind on every video he makes for the rest of my life to support the channel 😂 love the content as usual, IT mixed with some humor
You're not wrong about the state of I/O right now. Lots of hype about N100 (lower power, low cost, um low performance?) and the N305, but really they aren't great at I/O, which, uh, is kinda the whole point of a NAS. Low power desktop? Sure. People hear 8xNvME and make assumptions, no matter what's on the marketing. Yes, they are performing better than spinning rust, and consuming less power, but you're leaving almost 5x of their performance on the floor. Not sure where you're bottlenecking on the NIC, but I bet it's PCIe contention somewhere. Gen 3x1 should be just enough for 10GbE, I think. But I don't really blame TerraMaster since there's not a lot of choice here - Intel reserves their high lane counts for the Xeons, and of course those are a different price (profit margin) point. All of Intel's desktop and low power chips are nerfed for I/O IMO. But you should still be able to max out that NIC with 8 SSD's, and ultimately that's probably good enough for this device.
The takeaway that I get is you can buy the slowest NVME drives around. I have a bnch of Crutial P3 SATA drives in a Raid 5 and they're dog crap slow too.
Most off-the-shelf NAS companies are just trying to push to all-NVME and then adding PCIe switches to allow for all of the connections on a low-power chip or CPU die to make it work. I think it would be fairly cost prohibitive to have all ports allow x4 to get full bandwidth because they would have to put EPYC CPUs in them to get the lanes to do so. It is just so much easier to do all-SSD and get decent speeds and still be able to use a decent chip.
The only argument I see for this is low power mobile NAS. Otherwise I think for the money I'd rather just get one that uses spinners and is slightly bigger.
Personally I want the most space at a reasonably cheap price; something like TRAID sounds good as far as plugging in larger drives later when those larger drives are cheaper. But in reality, I'd be happy with the 500 MBps that one would see from 2.5 inch SSD's ( Sata 6, I believe ) . That's where drive count comes into play; 6 to 8 drives to me is what I'd want; and since I'd want to purchase two devices - one for active use, and a second that just runs a secondary copy.. Anyways, this unit is one that "I Could Live With... " In some respects, I'd rather have a 2.5 inch based unit as it could be more easily be hot swappable. For mainly file storage and systems backups. Want to go with Solid State as I might be more mobile later on, and less concern with spinning disks when traveling. Dedupe would also be a great feature to consider. Larger 2.5 SSD's and NVME drives are both expensive, at least in this point in time.
If it cost two times less and wo any OS - that can be my choice. For now it will be ryzen 7600 on matx board with 6 fullspeed pcie 4.0x4 drives. Yes, its only 6 drives, but its expandable - I can buy at lest one Sabrent PC-P3X4 adapter (or similiar) for another 4 drives, but on speed like hero of this video have.
this is basically the wave of the future - smb will want to get 2 but how hard is it to set up a linux box - or two and accomplish the same thing: not very hard and you can do it much cheaper plus be able to upgrade and have storage options. for non IT inclined smb it could be the ticket
Man, I would have bought this, if it had better speed and performance. Yet, I think that I will wait until they do the Next Generation of this, because I could sure love this at a lower price.
To me, this looks amazing! The only issue is that high-density NVME and M.2 drives are crazy expensive right now. I agree with @firebreafdragon. I'd like to see how this compares in performance against a more traditional 6 or 8 bay NAS. You might find deals for 4 TB NVME drives, but I've seen the great prices on 2 TB SSDs all year round. I don't know who's building NAS drives with 2 TB drives. Not that there's anything wrong with that. To each his own (I guess).
We have a couple customers who use relatively small NVME pools for 'hot' data that then gets moved to spinning rust when projects are completed, I could see something like this being used in a similar fashion. That said the cost given the units limitations make it kind of a hard sell.
@@nadtz so, I have a bunch of old 2 TB hard drives that I was planning on putting it into a network attached storage for documents only. They're all leftover from previous builds that I have upgraded. It would give me about 8TB give or take to use. It's a lot for documents, but in reality. In 2024 we all have way more than just documents theses days. Like you said it's a hard sell to fill a niche need.
From the performance standpoint this NAS is tailored to 10GbE. To use 8 NVMe drives they must have used PCI-E switching chips, as 9 PCI-E lanes is just not enough to to give x1 to every NVMe with USB controllers, LAN chip etc. This also adds to the cost, probably so much, that they would be better using an i3 or something similar. But then they would need better cooling for CPU and NVMe that would run faster... constant upgrade train has left the station. For a normal user that this targets performance is OK. This NAS is just more about form factor - being small and silent. The least attractive point about this NAS is the price. 840 Euro in Europe plus the cost of the drives makes it massive. I'm more on the capacity side of things so for the price you can buy a spinning rust NAS with x5 the capacity or build one yourself with even more capacity. I know, two different use cases, two different market targets. I just hope that flash memory will be even faster in chasing classic HDDs in term of capacity and prices.
My biggest frustration with most NAS systems and DIY NAS cases is their size and power requirement. Why do they ALL come with 3.5 inch bays? I get that their is a performance assumption when using NVMe but honestly this system checks a lot of boxes to me. I still wish the NVMes had removable trays but the power consumption and footprint of device are exactly what I am looking for.
Really if it was pci-e 4.0 x1 there really wouldnt be much of a problem. not many things need the speed of 4x. Maybe if your editing 4k raw off the drives or using it as a game drive.
Yeah after watching another review on this the other day and he stated those m.2 slots showed up as PCIE 3.0 x1 that makes this a non starter for me. The chip only supports PCIe 3 and only 9 lanes.
1GB is 10Gbit, and who has >10Gbit/s networking at home? Not many people. We’re probably using WiFi or 2.5Gbit copper. If this is quiet and low power, it can beat out a spinning rust setup in a small home environment. Until Intel deliver lots of fast lanes in consumer cpus and mobos, these things are always going to be way slower than local storage. To expect 8 nvme drives going at full performance in this kind of device is a bit silly.
Are there any NASes out there that are 8-12 NVME drives that use FreeNAS or a ZFS based NAS OS that has 10Gbit base port upgradable to 100GBit port for max throughput? Or am I just dreaming?
join the club, I got the same setup with the penta hat and pi 5 Although the price tag of this device is a bit excessive so it might be worth waiting for a bit, also it seems that everyone and their grandma's are starting to produce similar products so there could be some competition.
@@Nodster It would be nice to have some competition, to maybe bring down prices and up availability. I've been waiting a couple of months for the radxa and it finally arrived yesterday. I'm plugging away on my CompTIA/Cisco certs, and now going down the homelab rabbit-hole (as my checking account permits!)
I would love to see one of the chip manufacturers realize that the market is ready for a low power CPU like the N305 with a crap ton of PCIe lanes. (As compared with 9 anyway, I recognize that network limitations make full 4x4 NVMe across 8 SSDs kinda pointless. But a unit like this with two 10g NICs and enough lanes to the SSDs to saturate those NICs if bonded with just 4 drives would be a sweet package.
After talking to some people who do/understand chip design low power + a ton of PCIE isn't going to happen, at least anytime soon. If you look at say an 8 core Epyc vs Zen chip that huge IO die doubles TDP for PCIE gen 3 and 4 and is more than that for pcie gen 5. That said I would be interested to know if you went from 128 pcie lanes to maybe 60 would it be possible to drop power consumption enough for it to be worth it. 60 lanes would be enough for say 10 NVME plus 10GbE and whatever other IO you want to toss in.
@@nadtz I'm not necessarily talking about those sort of numbers, but even something like 32 lanes on an all E-core chip would be a huge deal for consumer flash NAS.
@@lifefromscratch2818 Maybe a bit more than 32 so you could do 8x NVME + other IO. Say about 40 and you could also do 2x NICs and whatever other IO you want/need. Question is would enough of them sell for it to be worth producing.
@@nadtz who knows, but all these consumer flash NAS boxes coming out must mean someone is buying them. But every time the complaint comes from only having 9 lanes. Granted, they're still generally able to saturate the available networking.
I was in the same boat. For $500 I can diy a computer with at least a little more performance. I never understand how nas can be so expensive and use the lowest end cpu known to man.
I mean i get the whole power over heat cpu argument, but what's the point of these if the drives themselves can go faster than the cpu hardware? Seems like 800 bucks plus another 800 in drives that are limited in speed due to cpu is a waste...imo
So weird their system runs on linux, but doesn't have a linux backup option. Linux is the easiest thing you can develop a backup solution for, but Terra is like, nah.
HOLY SH** An N305/N300 system without a debilitating amount of RAM that makes it completely useless? Is that... legal? LOL $800. At that price it should include a 125H. Can somebody explain to me how 1GB/s is "bad" when the device is limited to 10GBe (~1.1 GB/s in ideal conditions)? The 8X NVME is *clearly* for capacity and data resiliency options, not... performance.
I mean at that price point, and that isn't including the required NVMe drives, I really don't see the point of this thing. I can get relatively close to these speeds on my spinning rust Raid-Z2, with prices per TB that are VERY different. So the only upside that remains is the size and maaaybe power usage? Single PCIe lane per drive is just a waste. And yes, I'm aware that you won't get any more than that through the network link, but then why even bother with NVMe in the first place? This thing just makes very little sense in general...
the cost to storage of nvmes isn't realy worth it, considering most people don' t have 100gb network speeds. Also if a NAS doesn't have hot swap drives, its not a NAS worth having
Dumb question time.. the longevity of ssd in a nas? Are Nvme better and Do have a use case for nas? I thought the constant use in a nas meant the life span was massively reduced vs spindle hdds. Its an interesting little device though, shame about the cost, must have been quite a chunk of dollar by the time you maxed it out with nvme drives!
Serve The Home recently did a new video about flash reliability. You may find it interesting. NVMEs are essentially better than spinning disks in every aspect except price. By 2028 or so they may be cheaper per GB as well, marking the EOL for spinning drives. Once price parity is reached, there is absolutely no benefit not to use solid state.
@@WilReid Spinning rust will still be king at $/gb even if NVME drops massively for archival storage. Additionally the hardware you would need to run say 12 NVME vs 12 spinners will also factor into it for use outside business, consumer hardware doesn't have the IO for it and server hardware with enough PCIE lanes will use more power and probably cost more even second hand. STH was also talking about enterprise NVME which are generally much harder to find in M.2 so now you also need a chassis that can handle U.2/U.3 or one of the newer EDSFF form factors. Long story short for the typical homelabber spinning rust will still be the go to for lots of storage and that's probably not going to change for a while.
To add on to the other comments, I believe SSDs actually need to be powered on every so often otherwise they get corrupted. So being constantly powered on in an NAS is probably fine. But usually you'd want an SSD NAS for something like video editing (if we're talking about the actual file storage aspects), but even then that only applies to active projects. HDDs are still ideal for long term archival storage, especially with SSDs not liking to be powered down for long periods of time.
@@nadtz Unless the trend lines change, spinning rust won't be king in less than 5 years. NVME will (again, if current trends continue) be cheaper eventually and at that point a spinning disk makes no sense whatsoever. Just as a spinning disk makes no sense for an OS drive these days. There are currently too many benefits, and once price parity is achieved or even beaten, there will be no trade-offs. Even if you had to add a PCI-e to NGFF/M.2/whatever exists in 10 years just to populate with a bunch of SSDs, that's no different than buying a SATA/SAS HBA now or just like people have been doing the last 10-20 years. You don't need max lanes of latest hypergobbledegook gen PCI-e to be better than SATA. 1 lane of just about any PCI-e spec already gets close to what consumer spinning drives can max out at, and fewer lanes shouldn't mean more latency. Curious to test that now. Then there's future bifurcation which should become more popular and common and always switches which could also become more common thus cheaper with economics of scale. It'll add some latency but still be orders of magnitude better than HDDs. And it'll all use less electricity. In short, bigger NVME drives are getting cheaper more quickly than bigger HDDs are getting cheaper, and that means the death of spinning disks some day. I remember arguing with people about the cost of SSDs back when OCZ was still in business. I still have one of their 30GB models. People said SSDs/flash would never become cheap enough to be commonplace. Heck, I'm pretty sure back in 2010 someone told me that flash would never be less than $1.00/GB. Well, I just bought a 2TB P44 Pro for less than $140 or $0.07/GB. It won't be tomorrow, might even be 50 years from now, but eventually SSDs may be less than $1/TB and HDDs will be nothing but antiques most people have never heard of.
I love these little devices but at 799$ for x1 speeds just doesn’t cut it. Nvme might be cheap to implement but not cheap to IO. I’d pay 999$ + for full bandwidth
Hitting half of the 10gb network speed is total crap. You might as well have old spinning hard drives and save your money. They need to use a CPU that has enough lanes to allow the unit to fully saturate 10gb - otherwise, what is the point. We pay these companies to have this figured out. If this unit would have hit 10gb fully saturated, I would be ready to buy it. I am ready to buy one once they exist.
Consumer QLC ssd in raid , how about no ? Try rebuild or write more data at once and see each of them dropped to 100MB/s which slower than a hdd Commercial QLC have more channel and flash to stack up a usable write speed. Consumer QLC and SMR drive should get bannded in raid setup Can you imagine how long your rebuild time was ? Longer rebuild time = longer time get less protection or no protection if you only got 1 parity drive
From experience, Terramaster's software isn't great. Had multiple instances where a storage pool outright disappeared. Thought something was wrong with the hardware, so I got a brand new replacement only to encounter the same issue. No way I'd trust Terramaster software with my data. Just installed TrueNAS scale on the hardware and never had issues since
Very cute, but waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too expensive for my purpose. $800 for an empty box, and then you still have to buy for a couple of thousands (if you really want bulk storage) in SSDs. Yeah no thanks. I'll stick to my HDDs for now.
Should have gone with a gen4 cpu and then stuck in a pair of pcie switchs. That way a whole array could still reach 5-7 GB/s ie one Gen4x4. It's a shit design at a expensive price
1x PCIE3.0? That's no better than my CM3588 NAS kit, which costs a quarter of the price. Though it's not x86 based and only has 4 NVME slots, I don't see how it could cost 4x as much.
My My. I have regular Seagate Iron Wolfs in my Synology. And a 10Gb NIC too. Proprietary doesn't bother me that much. DSM works well as it should. I don't run lots of other stuff on mine. No I don't have DSN on it, nor signin stuff. Don't want anything outside seeing my NAS.
@@timradde4328 Synology + 10GB Network adapter is already at least 800 EURs NAS and don't even think put more Synology memory, that will be 1000 EURs total ( Any other memory, voids the warrant iimmediately ) yeah, they are a real pice of work, but again, if you are happy, thats whats matter. Myself I'm done with them.
800 bucks? F that. That's completely insane for a bunch of M.2 slots. It's poorly designed if it costs that much to make. You don't need Gen 4x4 slots when you're striping data off 8 freaking drives. Even running all the drives at Gen 3x1 would nearly saturate 10 GbE if functioning properly. Ok... what the hell. I just finished the video. I'd written that just after the start. This NAS is an absolute POS and a complete absolute rip off for $800. $200 maybe $300 tops for something like this. It's way overpriced for what's inside and doesn't even work correctly. You should slap together a similar spec'd ATX system (close CPU, RAM, etc. with the same Crucial drives) with a couple cheap PCI-e to 4 M.2 cards and a 10GbE NIC to show how this thing SHOULD work. The real problem is the absolute POS CPU with 9 lanes. 8 for drives leaves just 1 Gen 3 lane for the networking. Of course it's going to be crap. Final thought, any company pairing an N100 or N300 CPU with a 10 gigabit NIC is insulting you. They know, or should know, it's never going going to live up to the promise they're making or the expectations they're creating.
Another cool device crippled by a glorified calculator CPU..... $800 up front (plus another $800 for drives at least), for results in line with almost any basic external HDD that can be had for a couple hundred bucks tops? Thanks for the great review, but no thanks TerraMaster.
800 dollar and not even Thunderbolt (40 GBit).... And running ssds on gen3 rofl 😂 why then the 10 gbit port.... Yeah another useless overpriced product.
"raid zero for maximum speed and maximum opportunity for data failure.'' Legit made me lol.
I mean... that's correct since everyone knows that "0" in "RAID0" stands for "how much data you can recover from single disk failure in RAID0" :D
Love the theory behind it but pricing is way off. Really love low power, small form factor, low noise and ease of use. BUT...the speed is not a premium here and honestly 2.5gig would be fine. My target price here is 350~400. Vendors need to stop believing that NVME is somehow more upscale....it's not.
Its the perenial problem with NASes. More PCIE lanes maeans a more powerful CPU. A more powerful CPU means more heat and cost. A more powerful CPU means more power used etc. An i3-N305 (9 lanes G3) is $309 tray price. Which is the top CPU in its TDP range. A brief look though the mindboggling list of Intel CPUs. The i3-1215U (20lanes G4/G3) is the closest in TDP and cost to the N305, but does not come in an embedded option. Then there is the P cores and E cores. N305 is eight E cores. The 1215U is 2P and 6E.
Exactly this. It's not like there aren't options out there that could actually power something like this (embedded Epyc or Epyc Siena for example) but it's going to cost a lot more and use substantially more power. That said I'll probably get a Siena setup in the long run for my NAS rebuild (starting out using a V5 Xeon) as it's probably the best performance per wt that also has enough PCIE lanes to support some U.2 drives.
They use plx pcie bridges/splitters. You lose performance, but it works
@@Phil-D83 I was under the impression that PLX Chips had almost died a death, and were pricey to buy and implement.
@@Yandarval they used ones that share lanes between the drives. You never get full performance on these less expensive devices.
@@Phil-D83 I see. Not touched one since the x99 days.
00:12 - Nice shirt! :D
Its from one of my favorite UA-camrs ❤️
@@RaidOwlwhich one?
At time 7:12, for btrfs, you can only take snapshots of subvolumes (and the root volume), not ordinary directories. Presumably, TOS is creating a subvolume when you create a shared directory with the GUI - hence the ability to version it with snapshots. The latest releases of OMV are also creating subvolumes for their shared directories when the underlying filesystem is btrfs.
Well it saturates the 10gbit ethernet port and 1 lane per ssd is all the small cpu can give...so i see no problem with the product? they could throw in a bigger cpu but that would mean higher costs, bigger form factor, more needed cooling, higher weight and noise etc. and still wouldnt be faster with a 10gbit ethernet connection, so perfect choice the way it is only problem i see is the price which feels a bit too steep.
Not actually sure how the SSD's being able to go faster will help given it's a single 10Gbit/s network interface.
I doubt most people are copying files internally on the NAS itself.
It would be interesting to put this up against a more traditional 6-8bay nas, Also what the fan noise is like when idle.
There are other reasons to go SSD vs HDD noise being one of them, imagine this in the corner of a bedroom or living room (For people who don't have dedicated spaces for their office)
So basically.... this is for me then, given my nas is in the bedroom :D
My next NAS needs to be quiet, cool, very low watts and able to fully saturate 10gb. I want to be able to run it full time, not hear it or have it heat up my office - all problems with my current units.
its also great for virtual machines too
@@markmonroe7330 Put sata SSDs in any nas that has or where you can put a 10Gb card in and you are all set. HDDs also can easily saturate 10Gb in a raid configuration, but come with noise and a little extra power draw.
@@markmonroe7330 and get a power via POE
This just makes me think of the AsusStor FlashStor FS67-series that Patrick and his team from ServeTheHome covered almost a year ago.
The 6-drive version is STILL priced at $449, albeit it only has dual 2.5 GbE for network connectivity, and also only has 4 GB of RAM (out of the box) along with an N5105 rather than the newer N305.
The 12-drive version has a 10 GbE NIC, but the same processor and RAM, for the same price ($799) as this system.
It's nice that these are starting to come down in price a little bit, but the lack of PCIe lanes means that you aren't really able to take full advantage of the NVMe SSDs that are being installed.
It's weird that it's transfering at only 5Gbit, I think the Asustor with an older CPU did better with 10Gbit. Maybe Terramaster is not doing any PCIe switching so that 10Gbit is just using one PCIe lane and that's it. Other than that I'd chuck the Terramaster software in the bin and use Truenas on it.
The package is super interesting if there are no needs for loads of storage, space is low and power bills are high. Also 8 efficiency cores can run lots of self hosted services with ease.
Yeah the 5G was interesting. It could be on my end but I’ve never had issues with that setup.
It could be just overhead that's bringing down the whole chain. A x1 connection is not enough theoretical for 10Gbit, much lesd when a whole system is involved in it. Maybe under a better optimized OS might do a bit better but I wouldn't count on it. Still a nice to have instread of 2.5Gbit.
@@TommyThousandFaces PCIE 3.0 1x is exactly enough for 10Gb.
PCIe 3.0 x1 is 8Gbit, so no, not nearly enough for 10Gbit
Not nearly? 8 VS 10 is close I'd say, but in a software raid it should go beyond @@toseltreps1101
I understand Enterprise SSDs can handle it- you have read optimised versions, and you can still get optane ssds.
Excellent presentation. Thank you. On second thought, which one of the available NVMe NAS devices actually has the best 10gb performance with say 8-drives or 6, 4?
like most NASs figure out your use case, then find the one that matchs it.
I will chime in here with a general Terrmaster comment. I've owned the original (?) F2-210 since 2020 and it just reliablly works since purchase. My use case is just an on network file archive as opposed to some file server I actually expect really good performance from. and for that it has been great.
Yeah for basic network sharing there is nothing wrong with terramaster. But with other competitors offering better software they need to keep up. I think they are doing that now with this release.
@@RaidOwl no arguement from me on this. And you helpfully pointed out short comings so people can make a better informed purchase decision
can we use this NAS for 2 partitions like 1st 4 drives for storage and 2nd 4 drives for backup for that storage in same NAS ?
Yes
I never understood this concept, and this certainly isn't the only device to do it - Why provide room for high performance components when there is a bottleneck with some other part of the product. It's so silly because marketing and pricing for that product often doesn't reflect those limitations either.
I am not really sure if I am still coming for the reviews, or if I am just in for the snarky remarks :'D. Love your writing and presentation, seriously enjoy the humor :'D. Lets keep those snapshots were they are ;). Thanks for the laughs :)!
Did this guy just call me Gen3x1?? Wait until I subscribe and hit the bell to give him a piece of my mind on every video he makes for the rest of my life to support the channel 😂 love the content as usual, IT mixed with some humor
Hey man 1GB/s is a lot of bandwidth!
The 10G NIC on there is simply to trick people into thinking they are getting a NAS with fast speeds and looked no further than that...
Copying a single file is a bad way to test 10Gb networking. You need multiple streams of data to hit the limit.
Not true
You're not wrong about the state of I/O right now. Lots of hype about N100 (lower power, low cost, um low performance?) and the N305, but really they aren't great at I/O, which, uh, is kinda the whole point of a NAS. Low power desktop? Sure. People hear 8xNvME and make assumptions, no matter what's on the marketing. Yes, they are performing better than spinning rust, and consuming less power, but you're leaving almost 5x of their performance on the floor. Not sure where you're bottlenecking on the NIC, but I bet it's PCIe contention somewhere. Gen 3x1 should be just enough for 10GbE, I think. But I don't really blame TerraMaster since there's not a lot of choice here - Intel reserves their high lane counts for the Xeons, and of course those are a different price (profit margin) point. All of Intel's desktop and low power chips are nerfed for I/O IMO. But you should still be able to max out that NIC with 8 SSD's, and ultimately that's probably good enough for this device.
Excellent takeaway from the video
Lol "boys and girl", I like how you casually snuk that one in. It's funny coz it's true.
The takeaway that I get is you can buy the slowest NVME drives around. I have a bnch of Crutial P3 SATA drives in a Raid 5 and they're dog crap slow too.
Most off-the-shelf NAS companies are just trying to push to all-NVME and then adding PCIe switches to allow for all of the connections on a low-power chip or CPU die to make it work. I think it would be fairly cost prohibitive to have all ports allow x4 to get full bandwidth because they would have to put EPYC CPUs in them to get the lanes to do so. It is just so much easier to do all-SSD and get decent speeds and still be able to use a decent chip.
The only argument I see for this is low power mobile NAS. Otherwise I think for the money I'd rather just get one that uses spinners and is slightly bigger.
the formfactor is great. i like it better than asustor’s flashstor because it takes up less space. now if they can improve on the performance.
Personally I want the most space at a reasonably cheap price; something like TRAID sounds good as far as plugging in larger drives later when those larger drives are cheaper. But in reality, I'd be happy with the 500 MBps that one would see from 2.5 inch SSD's ( Sata 6, I believe ) . That's where drive count comes into play; 6 to 8 drives to me is what I'd want; and since I'd want to purchase two devices - one for active use, and a second that just runs a secondary copy.. Anyways, this unit is one that "I Could Live With... " In some respects, I'd rather have a 2.5 inch based unit as it could be more easily be hot swappable.
For mainly file storage and systems backups. Want to go with Solid State as I might be more mobile later on, and less concern with spinning disks when traveling. Dedupe would also be a great feature to consider.
Larger 2.5 SSD's and NVME drives are both expensive, at least in this point in time.
If it cost two times less and wo any OS - that can be my choice. For now it will be ryzen 7600 on matx board with 6 fullspeed pcie 4.0x4 drives. Yes, its only 6 drives, but its expandable - I can buy at lest one Sabrent PC-P3X4 adapter (or similiar) for another 4 drives, but on speed like hero of this video have.
this is basically the wave of the future - smb will want to get 2 but how hard is it to set up a linux box - or two and accomplish the same thing: not very hard and you can do it much cheaper plus be able to upgrade and have storage options. for non IT inclined smb it could be the ticket
Could you try something like high-performance clustering?
Man, I would have bought this, if it had better speed and performance. Yet, I think that I will wait until they do the Next Generation of this, because I could sure love this at a lower price.
To me, this looks amazing! The only issue is that high-density NVME and M.2 drives are crazy expensive right now. I agree with
@firebreafdragon. I'd like to see how this compares in performance against a more traditional 6 or 8 bay NAS. You might find deals for 4 TB NVME drives, but I've seen the great prices on 2 TB SSDs all year round. I don't know who's building NAS drives with 2 TB drives. Not that there's anything wrong with that. To each his own (I guess).
I mean if you want a low power, small Plex/Docker server this would be pretty cool. The cost is what makes it a tough buy for a lot of use cases.
We have a couple customers who use relatively small NVME pools for 'hot' data that then gets moved to spinning rust when projects are completed, I could see something like this being used in a similar fashion. That said the cost given the units limitations make it kind of a hard sell.
@@nadtz so, I have a bunch of old 2 TB hard drives that I was planning on putting it into a network attached storage for documents only. They're all leftover from previous builds that I have upgraded. It would give me about 8TB give or take to use. It's a lot for documents, but in reality. In 2024 we all have way more than just documents theses days. Like you said it's a hard sell to fill a niche need.
From the performance standpoint this NAS is tailored to 10GbE. To use 8 NVMe drives they must have used PCI-E switching chips, as 9 PCI-E lanes is just not enough to to give x1 to every NVMe with USB controllers, LAN chip etc. This also adds to the cost, probably so much, that they would be better using an i3 or something similar. But then they would need better cooling for CPU and NVMe that would run faster... constant upgrade train has left the station.
For a normal user that this targets performance is OK. This NAS is just more about form factor - being small and silent. The least attractive point about this NAS is the price. 840 Euro in Europe plus the cost of the drives makes it massive. I'm more on the capacity side of things so for the price you can buy a spinning rust NAS with x5 the capacity or build one yourself with even more capacity. I know, two different use cases, two different market targets. I just hope that flash memory will be even faster in chasing classic HDDs in term of capacity and prices.
My biggest frustration with most NAS systems and DIY NAS cases is their size and power requirement. Why do they ALL come with 3.5 inch bays? I get that their is a performance assumption when using NVMe but honestly this system checks a lot of boxes to me. I still wish the NVMes had removable trays but the power consumption and footprint of device are exactly what I am looking for.
Really if it was pci-e 4.0 x1 there really wouldnt be much of a problem. not many things need the speed of 4x. Maybe if your editing 4k raw off the drives or using it as a game drive.
For me, using SSDs are about reliability, I've never had one fail, unlike hard disks.
Yeah after watching another review on this the other day and he stated those m.2 slots showed up as PCIE 3.0 x1 that makes this a non starter for me. The chip only supports PCIe 3 and only 9 lanes.
1GB is 10Gbit, and who has >10Gbit/s networking at home? Not many people. We’re probably using WiFi or 2.5Gbit copper. If this is quiet and low power, it can beat out a spinning rust setup in a small home environment. Until Intel deliver lots of fast lanes in consumer cpus and mobos, these things are always going to be way slower than local storage. To expect 8 nvme drives going at full performance in this kind of device is a bit silly.
Are there any NASes out there that are 8-12 NVME drives that use FreeNAS or a ZFS based NAS OS that has 10Gbit base port upgradable to 100GBit port for max throughput? Or am I just dreaming?
If they had the i5-13500H with 28 pcie 5.0 lanes this would be my immediate upgrade
I just can’t keep up! I finally received my radxa penta hat to build my pi nas, and now this? I’m so far behind…
More!!! MOAR!!!
@@RaidOwl 👍😂
join the club, I got the same setup with the penta hat and pi 5
Although the price tag of this device is a bit excessive so it might be worth waiting for a bit, also it seems that everyone and their grandma's are starting to produce similar products so there could be some competition.
@@Nodster It would be nice to have some competition, to maybe bring down prices and up availability. I've been waiting a couple of months for the radxa and it finally arrived yesterday. I'm plugging away on my CompTIA/Cisco certs, and now going down the homelab rabbit-hole (as my checking account permits!)
They also have a TerraMaster F8 non-plus
which is only 599.
Yet also has 1gbps speeds for the drives 🤔
I would love to see one of the chip manufacturers realize that the market is ready for a low power CPU like the N305 with a crap ton of PCIe lanes. (As compared with 9 anyway, I recognize that network limitations make full 4x4 NVMe across 8 SSDs kinda pointless. But a unit like this with two 10g NICs and enough lanes to the SSDs to saturate those NICs if bonded with just 4 drives would be a sweet package.
After talking to some people who do/understand chip design low power + a ton of PCIE isn't going to happen, at least anytime soon. If you look at say an 8 core Epyc vs Zen chip that huge IO die doubles TDP for PCIE gen 3 and 4 and is more than that for pcie gen 5. That said I would be interested to know if you went from 128 pcie lanes to maybe 60 would it be possible to drop power consumption enough for it to be worth it. 60 lanes would be enough for say 10 NVME plus 10GbE and whatever other IO you want to toss in.
@@nadtz I'm not necessarily talking about those sort of numbers, but even something like 32 lanes on an all E-core chip would be a huge deal for consumer flash NAS.
@@lifefromscratch2818 Maybe a bit more than 32 so you could do 8x NVME + other IO. Say about 40 and you could also do 2x NICs and whatever other IO you want/need. Question is would enough of them sell for it to be worth producing.
@@nadtz who knows, but all these consumer flash NAS boxes coming out must mean someone is buying them. But every time the complaint comes from only having 9 lanes. Granted, they're still generally able to saturate the available networking.
IDGAF about the NAS. I’m here for the jokes.
Price on this is ridiculous, I got extremely excited until I saw the price. Huge markup.
Yeah at $600 I could see it being a decent deal. $500 would be a great price.
I was in the same boat. For $500 I can diy a computer with at least a little more performance. I never understand how nas can be so expensive and use the lowest end cpu known to man.
I mean i get the whole power over heat cpu argument, but what's the point of these if the drives themselves can go faster than the cpu hardware? Seems like 800 bucks plus another 800 in drives that are limited in speed due to cpu is a waste...imo
if the company its honest about it, dont see harm doing and yeah i think people should do some digging to know the hardware they are buying
Agreed, I'm glad they are up front about the advertised speeds.
So weird their system runs on linux, but doesn't have a linux backup option. Linux is the easiest thing you can develop a backup solution for, but Terra is like, nah.
This would be good for RV people who are concerned with hard drive durability on the road.
HOLY SH** An N305/N300 system without a debilitating amount of RAM that makes it completely useless?
Is that... legal?
LOL $800. At that price it should include a 125H.
Can somebody explain to me how 1GB/s is "bad" when the device is limited to 10GBe (~1.1 GB/s in ideal conditions)?
The 8X NVME is *clearly* for capacity and data resiliency options, not... performance.
Considering the device does more than transfer data over the network some users may way more performance internally for virtualization.
Probably should have re-edited to be less negative about the speed.
No
It would be cool if it can run XPEnology
I mean at that price point, and that isn't including the required NVMe drives, I really don't see the point of this thing. I can get relatively close to these speeds on my spinning rust Raid-Z2, with prices per TB that are VERY different. So the only upside that remains is the size and maaaybe power usage? Single PCIe lane per drive is just a waste. And yes, I'm aware that you won't get any more than that through the network link, but then why even bother with NVMe in the first place? This thing just makes very little sense in general...
the cost to storage of nvmes isn't realy worth it, considering most people don' t have 100gb network speeds.
Also if a NAS doesn't have hot swap drives, its not a NAS worth having
The product doesn't make financial sense, perhaps a bundling deal would help push units, but overall, a waste of resources.
for that price just buy 8 x some sheap PC and install ceph and that's it.. More speed and more redundancy..
Lol nobody wants to do that 😅
How do you think it would compare to the Asustor Flashstore 6/12? it is priced right between them, and looks like it might fill that sort of use case.
Prob like you said, right between them. I have to try their software again.
I'd like something like it with plain boring Debian Linux
Dumb question time.. the longevity of ssd in a nas? Are Nvme better and Do have a use case for nas? I thought the constant use in a nas meant the life span was massively reduced vs spindle hdds. Its an interesting little device though, shame about the cost, must have been quite a chunk of dollar by the time you maxed it out with nvme drives!
Serve The Home recently did a new video about flash reliability. You may find it interesting. NVMEs are essentially better than spinning disks in every aspect except price. By 2028 or so they may be cheaper per GB as well, marking the EOL for spinning drives. Once price parity is reached, there is absolutely no benefit not to use solid state.
@@WilReid Spinning rust will still be king at $/gb even if NVME drops massively for archival storage. Additionally the hardware you would need to run say 12 NVME vs 12 spinners will also factor into it for use outside business, consumer hardware doesn't have the IO for it and server hardware with enough PCIE lanes will use more power and probably cost more even second hand. STH was also talking about enterprise NVME which are generally much harder to find in M.2 so now you also need a chassis that can handle U.2/U.3 or one of the newer EDSFF form factors. Long story short for the typical homelabber spinning rust will still be the go to for lots of storage and that's probably not going to change for a while.
To add on to the other comments, I believe SSDs actually need to be powered on every so often otherwise they get corrupted. So being constantly powered on in an NAS is probably fine. But usually you'd want an SSD NAS for something like video editing (if we're talking about the actual file storage aspects), but even then that only applies to active projects. HDDs are still ideal for long term archival storage, especially with SSDs not liking to be powered down for long periods of time.
@@nadtz Unless the trend lines change, spinning rust won't be king in less than 5 years. NVME will (again, if current trends continue) be cheaper eventually and at that point a spinning disk makes no sense whatsoever. Just as a spinning disk makes no sense for an OS drive these days. There are currently too many benefits, and once price parity is achieved or even beaten, there will be no trade-offs. Even if you had to add a PCI-e to NGFF/M.2/whatever exists in 10 years just to populate with a bunch of SSDs, that's no different than buying a SATA/SAS HBA now or just like people have been doing the last 10-20 years. You don't need max lanes of latest hypergobbledegook gen PCI-e to be better than SATA. 1 lane of just about any PCI-e spec already gets close to what consumer spinning drives can max out at, and fewer lanes shouldn't mean more latency. Curious to test that now. Then there's future bifurcation which should become more popular and common and always switches which could also become more common thus cheaper with economics of scale. It'll add some latency but still be orders of magnitude better than HDDs. And it'll all use less electricity.
In short, bigger NVME drives are getting cheaper more quickly than bigger HDDs are getting cheaper, and that means the death of spinning disks some day.
I remember arguing with people about the cost of SSDs back when OCZ was still in business. I still have one of their 30GB models. People said SSDs/flash would never become cheap enough to be commonplace. Heck, I'm pretty sure back in 2010 someone told me that flash would never be less than $1.00/GB. Well, I just bought a 2TB P44 Pro for less than $140 or $0.07/GB. It won't be tomorrow, might even be 50 years from now, but eventually SSDs may be less than $1/TB and HDDs will be nothing but antiques most people have never heard of.
I love these little devices but at 799$ for x1 speeds just doesn’t cut it. Nvme might be cheap to implement but not cheap to IO. I’d pay 999$ + for full bandwidth
Hitting half of the 10gb network speed is total crap. You might as well have old spinning hard drives and save your money. They need to use a CPU that has enough lanes to allow the unit to fully saturate 10gb - otherwise, what is the point. We pay these companies to have this figured out. If this unit would have hit 10gb fully saturated, I would be ready to buy it. I am ready to buy one once they exist.
I know you said I was Gen3 x1
...but I feel Gen1 x4 :(
Consumer QLC ssd in raid , how about no ?
Try rebuild or write more data at once and see each of them dropped to 100MB/s which slower than a hdd
Commercial QLC have more channel and flash to stack up a usable write speed.
Consumer QLC and SMR drive should get bannded in raid setup
Can you imagine how long your rebuild time was ? Longer rebuild time = longer time get less protection or no protection if you only got 1 parity drive
lol no
"Boys and girl".. 🤣🤣
You don’t know how true this is 😅
@@RaidOwl Fortunately my wife didn't learn what a nerd I am until WELL after we were married!
I think this is one of the best reviews you've ever done man. Good job.
From experience, Terramaster's software isn't great. Had multiple instances where a storage pool outright disappeared. Thought something was wrong with the hardware, so I got a brand new replacement only to encounter the same issue. No way I'd trust Terramaster software with my data. Just installed TrueNAS scale on the hardware and never had issues since
Yeah I haven’t been the biggest fan but it seems like TOS 6 will be a big improvement. I’ll try it out once it hits production to see.
899$ ? BYE !!!
Very cute, but waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too expensive for my purpose. $800 for an empty box, and then you still have to buy for a couple of thousands (if you really want bulk storage) in SSDs. Yeah no thanks. I'll stick to my HDDs for now.
Does it fit in the 10 inch rack?
That's what she said...?
Should have gone with a gen4 cpu and then stuck in a pair of pcie switchs. That way a whole array could still reach 5-7 GB/s ie one Gen4x4. It's a shit design at a expensive price
1x PCIE3.0? That's no better than my CM3588 NAS kit, which costs a quarter of the price. Though it's not x86 based and only has 4 NVME slots, I don't see how it could cost 4x as much.
Well is better than the Synology crap full of proprietary hardware and drives and limited with 1gb Nics.
My My. I have regular Seagate Iron Wolfs in my Synology. And a 10Gb NIC too. Proprietary doesn't bother me that much. DSM works well as it should. I don't run lots of other stuff on mine. No I don't have DSN on it, nor signin stuff. Don't want anything outside seeing my NAS.
@@timradde4328 Synology + 10GB Network adapter is already at least 800 EURs NAS and don't even think put more Synology memory, that will be 1000 EURs total ( Any other memory, voids the warrant iimmediately ) yeah, they are a real pice of work, but again, if you are happy, thats whats matter. Myself I'm done with them.
They missed the opportunity to make a 10-inch rack form factor. We all want a valid excuse to buy that rack :P
800 bucks? F that. That's completely insane for a bunch of M.2 slots. It's poorly designed if it costs that much to make. You don't need Gen 4x4 slots when you're striping data off 8 freaking drives. Even running all the drives at Gen 3x1 would nearly saturate 10 GbE if functioning properly. Ok... what the hell. I just finished the video. I'd written that just after the start. This NAS is an absolute POS and a complete absolute rip off for $800. $200 maybe $300 tops for something like this. It's way overpriced for what's inside and doesn't even work correctly.
You should slap together a similar spec'd ATX system (close CPU, RAM, etc. with the same Crucial drives) with a couple cheap PCI-e to 4 M.2 cards and a 10GbE NIC to show how this thing SHOULD work. The real problem is the absolute POS CPU with 9 lanes. 8 for drives leaves just 1 Gen 3 lane for the networking. Of course it's going to be crap.
Final thought, any company pairing an N100 or N300 CPU with a 10 gigabit NIC is insulting you. They know, or should know, it's never going going to live up to the promise they're making or the expectations they're creating.
Drop the drives down to 4, give each 2 lanes, change the NIC to 2.5G, shave $250 off the price & it’d be a way better balance.
Another cool device crippled by a glorified calculator CPU..... $800 up front (plus another $800 for drives at least), for results in line with almost any basic external HDD that can be had for a couple hundred bucks tops? Thanks for the great review, but no thanks TerraMaster.
way too expensive
I bought an 8TB Samsung T5 for $500 and called it a day.
too expensive
The cost makes it a complete turn-off!!!! After hearing the cost, I stopped watching and rated the video
You didn’t like the video because I told you the price? Lol
800 dollar and not even Thunderbolt (40 GBit).... And running ssds on gen3 rofl 😂 why then the 10 gbit port.... Yeah another useless overpriced product.
Looks like an overpriced piece of sheet to me
underwhelming? sounds more like a straight LIE
What’s the lie?
@@RaidOwl speed they claimed
@@forsaken1776 They claimed 1GB/s per drive and thats what it gets...kind of annoying but I wouldn't say its a lie.
@@RaidOwl oh ok I must of gotten confused. My mistake your fault 🤣
@@forsaken1776no this one's on me
Scam.