TERRAMASTER D5 Thunderbolt 3 Professional-Grade 5-Bay External Hard Drive Enclosure RAID 0/RAID1/RAID5/RAID10/JBOD Hard Disk RAID Storage (Diskless)

Moved from Slapple to WIndows and wanted to take advantage of Thunderbolt 3 - what a drive ! Support answered all my geeky questions quickly. I'm buying another !UPDATE **** 2 years later....I ended up selling both of these drives on eBay for several reasons:1 - Apparently having two D5s attached to my GigaByte Z390 caused a problem with Windows 10 that made the drives unreliable2 - I have two other editing systems running Windows 10; 2 have Promise Pegasus 3 R6s. Both of those machines go to sleep with no issues. The PC sleeps and the drives power down, starting up again when the system wakes. The D5 will go to sleep but when the system wakes up the RAID crashes and has to rebuild itself. I use RAID 5 and once while I was trying to figure out what was causing this, I lost 2 drives, so, the RAID could not be rebuilt. The drives were fine after a low level format but the D5 obviously did something catastrophic to them when it tried to wake up. I contacted TM support and was told all RAID drives could not sleep. Radio silence, when I informed them about the Pegasus. I realize the Pegasus is 4 times the cost of the D5, but you get what you pay for !3 - the HighPoint Tech Raid Utility is worthless, if you ask me, while the Promise Utility is smokin'.Our PCs are on all the time to do backups and and remote in, etc; but, if you never have your computer sleep, the performance isn't terrible on the D5 and would do the job but the D5 also consumes quite a bit of power ( .26 KWH ) with the PC off and .38 KWH when it's on. At our rate that's 3.5 cents and hour. Hey, it adds up in the TCO...TM support was polite albeit not offering any solutions for the driver or the sleep issue. We are very happy with the R6s and I wish I had not tried to save money on a budget enclosure...

I have it configured with 5 drives in RAID 5. Overall I'm happy with the storage unit. Mostly pros, some cons.Pros:- Easy to setup and configure with the RAID SW- Large capacity- Solid outside case- Fast sequential read/write performance- So far very reliable- Fans are quiet and temps adequately controlled- USB-A 3.0 port for connecting another deviceCons:- Somewhat noisy. No apparent sound dampening, the drives click and chirp noticeably. Not terrible but can be distracting especially if you like quiet.- The handle on top can be convenient for moving, but would be much better if it were removable- The sequential R/W speed is very good, but random R/W is slow with RAID 5.- Limited to only Thunderbolt connectivity. There is a USB-A port but can't be used to connect the device to a computer. Having the USB option would be a plus.- Expensive compared to similar USB 3.0 enclosures.

Purchased in September 2023. Very little documentation to help with set up but not a big deal. Worked absolutely fine. Beginning of June 2024 a newish HDD failed. I have an older RAID with which I have swapped five drives over the years. Each time, after a long rebuild process, I was seamlessly back up and running. I expected the same with the Terramaster. I bouth a new drive, installed it and the rebuild light indicated everything was fine. I had almost 9TB to rebuild so I left it and came back the next day to find the rebuild finished, light on etc. But the RAID wasn't being recognized by the computer. Went through all the logical steps, turn it off, rebooted etc etc. THe RAID unit was seen as an unintialized drive. The RAID Manager Pro also showed the new drive and all the data etc. but still nothing on the computer. I contacted Terramaster and a first level SUpport person had me do all the things I had already done, to no avail. SHe then said she would take it up to an "Engineer". The "Engineer" came on chat and the very first thing he told me was that if the RAID was reading as uninitialized I should format it. I was stunned. How could someone purporting to be in IT tell a person to format a drive (Which is how Disk Management sees a raid)? I told him that a format would delete all my data which is the exact opposite of what I wanted and needed. It never got any better and he left me with the advice to get a Data Recovery Company to help me.I am extremely reluctant to write a bad review about electronic/computerstuff because there is so much room for mischief and innocent mistakes. However, my 100% advice in this case is to avoid this company at all costs. BTW: the 9TB represent all files for a full length Movie. I backed up about a month ago so it's not gonna be a total disaster but it will take me a good long week to replicate the edits I've done since the back up. I know- BACK UP! ANd for that I accept responsibility. However, my advice stands.