This Terramaster product (and probably the whole product line running on TOS 4.1.24) is NOT READY FOR PRIME TIME. That should give you chills for a product that you are relying upon to securely back up your stuff.
I have been running a Synology DS216j (RAID 1) with 2x4TB disks for 4+ years and it's been rock-solid. But I was running out of space so instead of upgrading to 8GB drives I thought I'd upgrade to a RAID 5 system with 4x4TB drives. Of course Synology is ridiculously expensive so I thought I'd buy a Terramaster F4-210 for $199.
What a mistake. Let me list SOME of the problems I have discovered over the last week of trying to convert over my system:
1. The UI is web-like pretty but functionally has huge flaws. It looks like they tried to model it after Synology's. But you can start multiple File Managers and multiple copies and then the copy dialog gets confused between what it is copying. On Synology there is a background task window that shows you what is happening. There is no background task window under TOS - if you lose the dialog then a zombie process sits out there copying away with no way of verifying it or stopping it.
2. Multiple times I tried a copy-paste operation and nothing happened. Or did it? You can't tell.
3. Multiple copies ended "successfully" but with fewer files than the source.
But the MAIN reason you cannot/should not buy this system is that I have no confidence their RAID system is actually working:
1. I copied all my files over from my Synology onto one new 4TB drive. That took days. I could never get NFS or FTP working, so had to settle for SMB/CIFS from Synology to Terramaster and USB hard drives.
2. Then I shutdown my Synology, extracted the 2 4TB drives and added them.
3. Then I went to the Storage Manager interface to convert Single Disk to RAID 5. NO, impossible. you can only add ONE drive and convert to RAID 1. And that was predicted to take 648 hours (that's 27 days!!). Fortunately it only took 16 hours.
4. Then I thought "well I bet I can now add my 2 remaining drives and have a RAID 5 system". NO, impossible, you can only add ONE drive and convert to a 3 drive RAID 5 system. Hopefully I will be able to add another drive after this finished (in 1000 hours it predicts!)
- Did I mention that all the dialogs are confusing and poorly written, telling you what the current configuration is, not what it will be when you press Confirm?
- Did I mention that when you go to Delete a big folder it may just stop working
- Did I mention that you can set your Shared Folders to NOT have a Recycle Bin (important when you have limited storage and are just copying files) but when you delete files, they still get copied to the Recycle Bin, which of course makes the whole deletion process take at least twice as long
I could go on, but you get the idea. THIS PRODUCT IS NOT READY TO TRUST YOUR FILES TO. Suck it up and buy a Synology. And lest you think I'm a shill for Synology, no I've still got my Terramaster but wish I didn't.
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