TerraMaster D2-310 2-Bay DAS Key Specifications
Here are the key specs for the TerraMaster D2-310:
Overall, this is a relatively simple device except for the RAID functionality built-in. Having that RAID functionality is a significant value-add compared to simple JBOD units.
Final Words
We liked the ease of setup of the TerraMaster D2-310 and its solid construction. We have looked at a WD Easystore 10TB USB back-up drive, that most users here at STH will shuck the drives from. It, like Seagate parallels, offers a simple USB DAS solution for backup, cold storage or simply enlarging your storage options. The TerraMaster D2-310 accomplishes the same workloads but offers data protection with RAID 1 making it differentiated over the more simple external enclosures. This is a big concern when dealing with very large capacity drives. With a single external USB drive, if a drive goes out you lose your data. With the TerraMaster D2-310 and RAID 1 offers data protection through redundancy.
One might simply use drives that you have on hand for a unit like this, which is what we did with the Crucial M500s. Performance of the TerraMaster D2-310 will vary a great deal depending on drives used. TerraMaster states 401.7 MB/s writes and 412.9 MB/s reads in RAID 0 when using SSHDs. We passed that with our HGST 10TB drives which is very good.
In the lab, we use a simple USB EZ-Dock and plug in our older retired HDDs to copy data we want to hold onto in cold storage and not use up NAS space. We can do that with the TerraMaster D2-310, use RAID 1 and have data protection. We have had older HDDs die on us so the D2-310 makes perfect sense to protect our data. The D2-310 is also fast enough to use with applications that open files stored on the DAS without a great deal of speed loose. We notice a fair amount of hard drive banging around with file accesses when we used the HGST 10TB hard drive. The D2-310 is fairly bareboned construction, additional hard drive support would be nice and help to contain noise from loud hard drives.
At around $129.99 street price, the TerraMaster D2-310 2-bay DAS is fairly close to lower-end NAS performance. As we start to see low-end NAS units come with 2.5GbE and even 10GbE support, this type of DAS will become pressured. There is a natural evolution where users buy multiple DAS units, then organize them into a larger NAS. This is on the earlier part of that evolutionary chain a user is likely to go through.
Nice review, but i have questions.
– Is it possible to read S.M.A.R.T. data from disks in all modes? Raid 0, raid 1, jbod and single? For example using gsmarcontr (windows gui of smartmontools)?
– And which chipset is used for usb connection?
Because i have some bad experiences with asmedia chipset regarding smart-data readings
What is a real life transfer speed of USB 3.1 gen1? I guess it is slower than 2x SSDs in RAID so gen2 port would have been a better option here.
working with synology nas ?
Any info on what RAID controller it uses?
Is there a chance we will see a follow-up with comparisons against Raiodon devices (OEM for some Icy-bow devices, and available under their own brand too)?