Hello everyone, I’m very new here but I’ve been watching the Level1Techs YouTube channel for a few years. I just recently re-watched Wendell’s video on the Terramaster F4-424 Max, and thought I would post here with some questions on a recent purchase of mine.
In December I quit a rather expensive and unhealthy vaping habit, and found myself with a little extra disposable income. I decided to start upgrading the old PCs in my room. Ended up with a couple AM5 systems that I like a lot. Quickly I found myself expanding all three of my PC’s storage with more and more 4TB SSDs. At a certain point I realized a proper NAS would probably be a better solution, since at the moment I’m keeping everything I download in triplicate across the three PCs.
I started looking at NAS devices a few months ago, but wasn’t initially planning on buying one for a little while. Well, Amazon one day offered both a 15% discount, and 3-month interest-free financing on my entire cart, so I went ahead and ordered the Terramaster F6-424 and one 16TB WD drive from ServerPartDeal’s amazon storefront.
I won’t have the financial ability to get the other drives for a few months, so at this point I’m just getting used to the device with one 16TB HDD for storage and a couple M.2 drives, one for caching and one for the OS.
So far I think I will keep the TOS 6.0 OS, since I’m fairly basic with my Linux knowledge and the advantages of other NAS OSes don’t really fit much into what I’ll be doing with the device. I’m setting it up as a seedbox (no need for a VPN) and a place to store loads of media. As far as running containers like Pi-Hole and the like, I’m not particularly interested in doing that at this time.
I appreciate that community apps exist for TOS, since a recent version of qBittorrent was really easy to download and install. I don’t need to run a VPN for it, so that simplified the setup a little. Copying things over was fairly easy from Windows, and I was able to migrate everything pretty effectively. It’s also nice to see the whole device use less than 1GB of RAM while doing its thing.
At this point I think I know what I want to do different when I get more drives, but I’m still not 100% sure. I do want to use the M.2 drives for caching, but have a question on read and write caching. At the moment I have a single 500GB set up for “safe” caching, where power loss won’t result in data corruption. When copying over the 6+TB of data to the single drive from Windows, I did notice this setup seemed to stall quite a bit, saturating the 2.5gb link only about half the time. For a single platter drive it wasn’t a terrible experience, but it is an area I’m looking for suggestions on for the future. Is it safe to run 2x M.2 drives in a mirror for “aggressive” caching of both read and writes? That’s what I was thinking of doing. I’m looking at a couple Team Group 2TB G50 drives, mostly for their write endurance.
A major reason I only have 1 HDD in the device right now is that the one I got (WD Ultrastar DC HC550) wasn’t specifically on the QVL list. It seems to work great though. I still have the option of not getting 5 more though, and going with something else. I like the 16TB HC550’s from ServerPartDeals because they’re pretty cost effective and come with a 2-year warranty. I was worried about the noise of a data-center drive, but honestly I can’t even hear it over the floor fan I run in my room. I think adding some more of them would be fine in this small room.
I’ve never dealt with a dedicated NAS before, so I’m very new to a lot of it. I have a little Linux experience, but not much with Docker and almost none with Portainer. I know this is the way I’m going to get the most functionality out of the device with its stock OS though, so I’m willing to learn as my needs evolve. So far just with one drive it’s doing everything I need it to do. Mostly I’m looking for some community guidance before dropping an additional $1200 on 5 more drives, and potentially a couple hundred more for the 2 G50 M.2 drives. At the moment it has 1x 500GB SN750 and 1x 1TB SN570 in it. The 500GB is being used for caching, and I meant to use the 1TB for the system drive. I got it mostly right but I do notice most of that 1TB space is unused and not formatted to anything. This frustrates me a little because I would at least like to install the system’s apps on it. At the moment /volume1 is on the HDD, so I don’t know if I completely understand how TOS 6 set stuff up. I would like to get this right by the time I add more drives.
So yeah, that’s where I’m at. I have the F6-424 (non-pro/max) and one 16TB WD data center drive. So far I really like it, but some stuff frustrates me like inefficient use of the 2 M.2 drives and being confident in the long-term data safety once stuff is all set up. I don’t have super-high requirements for the device, and am willing to learn a thing or two. Ultimately it will be functioning as a seedbox and storing masses of my and my family’s media, along with pictures and other backup data. I’m looking forward to not feeling the need to keep everything in triplicate on the three separate computers, and I’m really glad I finally joined the Level1Forum. I’ve heard Wendell talk about this community for a long time, and have always admired how dedicated both you guys are to helping people here. I’m looking forward to your suggestions and also to learning some stuff. Thanks!