Do the TerraMaster "D" series (enclosures) play nice with TrueNAS?

TrueNAS General
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terramaster-d4-enclosure

I know that drive enclosures are usually frowned upon, due to performance issues, supplying only a single USB cable to feed multiple drives, and the risk of serial number collision.

Has anyone had any positive experience using the TerraMaster enclosures,[1] such as this one?

Does it present each drive with its own serial number?

Does it suffer the same issues as using other multi-drive USB enclosures?

Such a plug-and-play setup would only be used for occasional “simple” backups, for data that isn’t too important, but nice to have on a mirror vdev for later retrieval.

  1. This is not to be confused with the “F” series, which are actual mini NAS servers. ↩︎

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Not answering your question, but QNAP TL-D400S and D800S SATA enclosures should play nice with ZFS:

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Doesn’t that require an SFF port on the computer? (Rather than USB-A or USB-C.)

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Indeed, it requires a HBA with external ports (and ships with a custom SATA controller card with a SFF-8088). That’s how it fits so well for ZFS.

As for the TerraMaster D is boils down to this question: What’s between the single USB port and the 4 SATA drives?

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I did some test initial testing with a D8 Hybrid for that scenario of secondary backup. It was on a virtualized Truenas Electric Eel under Proxmox.

If I remember correctly, I was able to see the drive serial numbers.
I got some problem with a 3x4TB raidz1 pool with some possible corruption, probably because of the usb connection. Scrub did not find any problem but the pool was unhealth and the replication stopped.
A single disk stripe pool was working better but again, very limited testing.

I want to try again with a dedicated secondary Truenas machine so I’m not limited by VM and usb passthrough. Just need to finish moving all my service to Proxmox so I can repurpose one of my mini pc.

My goal is to have a machine that could just wake up, pull the data via zfs replication and shutdown after.

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Just my hapenny worth here. FYI

I bought a TERRAMASTER D4-320, and put in 4 x 4Tb WD Red in it, and TrueNAS and have been running TrueNAS Scale 25.04 on it since before it released. It has been totally reliable. TrueNAS recognizes individual disks. SMART all works as individual disks. I’ve been monitoring temps on all the drives, and it never climbs above 35C. Scrubs are clean. It is quiet. Performance is good for what I use it for.

Why I did this. I have a “vintage” TrueNAS (FreeNAS) mini from 2016. One month after the 3-year extended warranty expired the MB hit the now well-known flash ram failure. I worked with ASRock and they replaced to board for $50, including shipping. (Great support). It has worked error free ever since. A few years back I ran out of disk space, so I upgraded to 20Tb WD Reds. TrueNAS mini is working great for home backups. It is showing its age as I can’t update the memory, the ddr that fits it is just not available anymore, but that’s another story.

So for a few years I have had the original 4x4TB Reds sitting around not being used. I also had a Beelink Ser 6 Ryzen that I just didn’t use much. Beelink has 8 cores, 32Gb ram, Ryzen 9 6900HX (up to 4.9GHz), 2.5Gbss Ethernet.

Thought I should try to put the Beelink and Terramaster together, use TrueNAS, and move the not so essential media apps and data to it.

I found an excellent informational video on youtube “Turn Your MINI PC Into A NAS - Terramaster D4-320 USB 3.2 DAS Review” on the “Server Science” channel. It goes into some great detail on the D4-320. I had some Amazon gift cards that gave me a heavy discount on the D4-320. It worked great! It still works great.
Apps I took off the FreeNAS Mini and put on this setup are, Plex, Sonarr, Radarr, Sabnzbd. I did this also because I enabled remote access to Plex, and I can keep the internet isolated from the mini. The Mini data is important, the D4-320/Ser6 is not.

For me, A really small investment for the Terramaster D4-320 and I have a great home media server. Works fine with all the TVs, Tablets, etc. It just sits in the corner and works. It’s quiet and cool too.

I run RaidZ1 on the Terramaster D4-320. I run RaidZ2 on the TrueNAS mini.

I did some extra research and the Terramaster D4-320 is the only JBOD, USB-C box that does:

  • :white_check_mark: Support for 3.5" HDDs
  • :white_check_mark: Individual drive access (true JBOD, not concatenated or hardware RAID-only)
  • :white_check_mark: SMART passthrough
  • :white_check_mark: 10Gbps USB-C connectivity
    (I grilled a few AI’s to confirm, but YMMV, its not to be trusted, …)

I would love to find out if there is another case with similar chip set to the D4-320. As I mentioned, my Mini is showing its age, and I wouldn’t mind upgrading to get more and cheaper ram for Zfs Cache. The bigger drives eat up the ram. If this Usb-c proves to be reliable, then one of these new mini pc with all the performance, and ram, and low noise just might be a solution for me.
The drives on the D4-320 never go above 35C, my Mini drives are always 10C higher. I have the fan speed set to max on, and it’s much louder than the D4-320/Ser6 combo.

So in summary, the Terramaster D4-320 works for me. Terramaster does not offer the same USB chip set in its other boxes. It doesn’t extend the “D” series in general.

TrueNAS is great! I love it. Sits in the corner and just works! With some work, it can site quietly. :grinning:

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@StuPo - I assume you’ve been running the Terramaster D4-320 for a while now. I wonder if you have any update on the reliability or performance to share. I’m about to set up a similar config and would be interested in any new info you may have. I’ve considered running this under Proxmox passing in the USB 3.2 port but I’ve not decided yet. I’ve tested it with a Mediasonic enclosure and it seems to work but I’m concerned about long term reliability. I feel I’m pushing my luck with a USB/Truenas/ZFS configuration as it is…

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I just bought one and it plays perfectly. I am running on 25.10 RC1 … The only thing that does not show in the UI reports are temperature and SMART info, but from the command line you get everything so the chip let the smart info pass through.

See … I have 3x20TB in a Raidz1 and a seperate 18TB in Stripe
root@NUUK:/root# for d in /dev/sd[b-e]; do

echo “== $d ==”
smartctl -A $d | awk ‘/Temperature_Celsius|Airflow_Temperature_Cel/’
done
== /dev/sdb ==
190 Airflow_Temperature_Cel 0x0022 062 044 000 Old_age Always - 38 (Min/Max 30/38)
194 Temperature_Celsius 0x0022 038 056 000 Old_age Always - 38 (0 15 0 0 0)
== /dev/sdc ==
190 Airflow_Temperature_Cel 0x0022 058 042 000 Old_age Always - 42 (Min/Max 31/42)
194 Temperature_Celsius 0x0022 042 058 000 Old_age Always - 42 (0 15 0 0 0)
== /dev/sdd ==
190 Airflow_Temperature_Cel 0x0022 063 028 000 Old_age Always - 37 (Min/Max 36/39)
194 Temperature_Celsius 0x0022 037 072 000 Old_age Always - 37 (0 15 0 0 0)
== /dev/sde ==
190 Airflow_Temperature_Cel 0x0022 058 048 000 Old_age Always - 42 (Min/Max 28/42)
194 Temperature_Celsius 0x0022 042 050 000 Old_age Always - 42 (0 20 0 0 0

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Do they report unique serial #’s?

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Yes :slight_smile:
Device: /dev/sdb [SAT], ST20000NM007D-3DJ103, S/N:ZVT5HS4F, WWN:5-000c50-0e5c9677e, FW:SN01, 20.0 TB
Device: /dev/sdb [SAT], not found in smartd database 7.3/5528.
Device: /dev/sdb [SAT], is SMART capable. Adding to “monitor” list.
Device: /dev/sdb [SAT], state read from /var/lib/smartmontools/smartd.ST20000NM007D_3DJ103-ZVT5HS4F.ata.state
Device: /dev/sdc [SAT], opened
Device: /dev/sdc [SAT], ST20000NM007D-3DJ103, S/N:ZVT5K6ZL, WWN:5-000c50-0e5cb5019, FW:SN01, 20.0 TB
Device: /dev/sdc [SAT], not found in smartd database 7.3/5528.
Device: /dev/sdc [SAT], is SMART capable. Adding to “monitor” list.
Device: /dev/sdc [SAT], state read from /var/lib/smartmontools/smartd.ST20000NM007D_3DJ103-ZVT5K6ZL.ata.state
Device: /dev/sdd [SAT], opened

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Seems remarkably well behaved.

I reviewed the linked video - it looks like they’re doing a USB hub and four individual ASMedia ASM235CM bridge chips rather than a port multiplier.

I do have some mild concerns about heat dissipation of the individual chips (both USB hub and ASMedia bridge) under sustained load, since I’m not sure on the airflow situation, but based on a quick peek at the datasheet they appear to be able to tolerate some pretty high temperatures.

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The main benefit that I can see for these would be a simple way for home NAS users to manage backups to a pool that has drive redundancy. Plug it in to an external USB-C port. Import the pool. Replicate. Export. Unplug. Store it offsite or in a safe box. Repeat for the next backup.

You still get the benefits of drive redundancy and ZFS protection, without needing to build an entire server just for simple backups.

The only time I can see it having to deal with a sustained load would be for the initial ZFS replication. After that, incremental replications will only require a fraction of the time.

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I had about 15TB replicated via rsync nonstop over the week-end, it dit not feel like anything was overheating. My only concern is that since it is USB-C, TrueNAS does not consider it seriously so there is no data for my drives in the UI that is very unfortunate.

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I have a D6-320 and it works great. Written 100tb non stop and not a single hitch. I think it is well designed

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Are you sure that’s because of the USB connection? Which version of TrueNAS? Wasn’t some drive info removed from the main UI?

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I am on 25.10 RC1, my other drives (internal to the system) do show temperature info. The UI show null for my HDDs in that enclosure.

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That’s probably because of the SATA-to-USB bridge eating SMART information.

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Didn’t @jbjoret post a few days ago the output of smartctl? Sure looked like the bridge was passing the information through?

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I’ll add that the Terra master folk put a bunch of intake holes on the side of the case, which likely does a pretty good job of washing that board with air flow. If that was my array, I’d consider perforating the front HDD covers to reduce static pressure drop.

However marginal the airflow conditions might be in that case, they surely cannot be as bad as they were for the upper drives in the MiniXL Generation anno approximately 2015 or whenever I bought mine. That 8 drive enclosure had one exit fan in the middle of the case and the upper drives in the array were roasting in their own juices.

Still within allowable case temps, I understand, but my present drives never approach the 45deg C the old MiniXL case subjected them to. Thanks to a much less constricted case, the drives now operate at no higher than 30*C, even under scrub.

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No it is not, that is the point, on the commandline you get everything as the 4 dedicated ASM235CM bridges chips are passthrough.Associated with a NUC13 1315U you get very good performances, low power consumption.

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