TERRAMASTER D5-300 USB3.1 (Gen1) Type C 5-Bay External Hard Drive Enclosure Support RAID 5, 0, 1, 10, Clone, JBOD, Single Disk Hard Disk RAID Storage (Diskless)

Greetings, if you are like me you saw that it was listed compatible with linux, this is not true. The most you will be able to achieve is a software RAID array with MDADM. You must look for articles on how to do it as Amazon will not let me post it. Digital Ocean has a good one. You more than likely want to run a RAID 5 or RAID 6 like me and I am using 3, 18TB drives for now until eventually I get 5. In my opinion, this or RAID 6 would be the best choice for data security. First take the hard drives and put them in one at a time and plug into your Linux PC. You want to open Disks and format each drive to be exfat4. This will set you up to follow the steps in the Digital Ocean guide, just Google it. Please follow this carefully and you will have success. Also to note, you MAY have rebooting issues if you modify your fstab, do NOT do that. Do NOT set it to boot at start. I would suggest mounting it manually each time you restart your PC only after having properly ejected it and powered it off. If you are like me and wish to make a media server with Jellyfin, etc, just leave it on, no need to turn your PC off honestly unless it's power consumption you're worried about. Once you've set up your RAID I would suggest rebooting a few times, copying files to see if they are still there after before you start moving big data around and of course, have a backup. I have seen speeds as high as 200mbps when transferring files, 25 for FTP over VPN, about 80-100 on average for write speed but I will say that pulling things up is incredibly snappy. If you choose not to read this or follow the steps I outlined, you will be in for a headache and a few empty bottles of alcohol by the time you've exhausted Reddit and everywhere else trying to find an answer. IF you are smart enough, reverse engineer the USB driver however I am not that guy. For the price and build quality this is not a bad unit at all and if you are smart enough, can get you by far better than something 4x the cost. If wanting to run a media server like me, get a cheap optiplex and run a GTX 1660 externally with a riser card, upgrade the RAM, get an SSD and 500W PSU, plug in one of these and you've got a beast for less than $600.

I own 6 units, 5 D5-300s and 1 D5-300c. I've been using Terramaster units for 6 years, and have loved them. Even when one unit failed about 1-2 months past the warranty period, customer service was friendly and helpful, and even replaced the unit quickly, even though it was past the warranty period. Every unit I had bought in the past worked flawlessly right out of the box. This year I was in the market to upgrade my storage. Two months ago I began the process. Unfortunately, the last time I ordered, I had to go through 4 units before receiving a working unit. Mind you I own 6 units, so I am aware of how they should function out of the box. The issue was that if the unit had cables disconnected, or drives disconnected, it would corrupt the data. Fortunately I had backups of my data on working units so I didn't lose anything. This brings me to my recent purchases. After my previous purchase, and going through 4 units to recieve a working one, I was hesitant, but ended to continue giving them my business due to my satisfaction of their working product. Unfortunately, I went through 5 units, and each had the exact same issues as before. Sadly, after this, I am officially giving up on Terramaster products and am now in the process of finding a replacement brand. It sad to have to switch, since this brand had given so much satisfaction over the past 6 years, but it's obvious that QC no longer exists with this company, and the hassle of trying to stick with them is not worth it. I'm now so disappointed with Terramaster, that they will never receive a single cent from me. Hopefully my future purchases with a different brand will be satisfactory. Terramaster should be ashamed of the product they're supplying to customers.

We had bought 2 YottaMaster 4 bay enclosures and 2 Mediasonic 4 bay enclosures, which did not meet our needs. The YottaMaster has a freakin 5 minutes sleep mode that cannot be disabled, the Mediasonic is an old design (1990s w/ light show) and has poor performance comparing to the TerraMaster D5-300. TerraMaster D5-300 does not have a sleep mode and only puts your drives to sleep when you shut down the attached machine or program a sleep mode. We want our servers to run 24/7 all year around. (Sleep mode will kill your drives) The enclosure seems to be well made and the transfer rates (read/write) speed in RAID 1 and 10 are outstanding. We clocked 200Mb/sec write speed and 220+ read speed. The only thing TerraMaster could improve, there were no instructions in the box, just a link to their website where they provide the instructions and software. The setup requires that you use their RAID master software, which only runs on windows or Mac. Means, we had to use a windows machine for setting the RAID levels. After that simple setup, our units work flawless on Unix/Linux with Ext4 filesystem. Unlike some other enclosures, this unit has 2 cooling fans build in, which provides more security when one of them dies. They also run fairly quiet, almost silent. Unless you have it in your bedroom, you won't hear it. We would have bought TerraMasters 4 bay unit because we only use 4 drives, but it seems to be backorder. However, this unit has 5 bays, which allows us to add one more drive and convert it to a RAID 5 should we have the need for more space. We have not tested the speed in RAID 5, but the unit actually had a label on it that said: " This enclosure is optimized for RAID 5". (I will update this review in the future, when or if we test the RAID 5)

This enclosure has been the perfect solution for my setup. It is very reasonably priced and makes swapping drives super easy. No tools required. The included software makes setting up a RAID very easy. It is not terribly noisy compared to others, but that is just a matter of opinion. The noise level has never bothered me. I edit videos stored on these drives, and the speed has never been an issue. The biggest negative from my point of view is that the enclosure does not go to sleep or automatically turn off. After I turned off my pc, the enclosure stayed on, and my drives just kept on spinning. This might not be a big issue, but I wanted mine to shut off, so I purchased a smart multiplug that would turn off once the pc turned off. With that in place, my setup has been working perfectly. I am very pleased with this purchase and will probably buy a second one at some point.

I have thousands of photos and do not want to store on a cloud system that down rates my raw files to a Jpeg for storage. After losing my main drive that affected my back up I lost a lot of files. So I bought a NAS system that worked fine until Netgear quit supporting my model that I was using. This is not a NAS system you do not have access to your photos when on line. It can be set up as a Raid system. I did not set up as a raid and it shows each drive on my computer. To install the drives they have to be screwed into the brackets. Terramaster comes with a screw driver and plenty of screws for this. Install the drives then plug it in. I had to go to disk management to get the computer to recognize the drives and assign a drive letter to each one, but that be due that my disks were used, and I re-formated them. . The quality is good for being mostly plastic. Very quiet. You can set up the system various ways to shut down when not in use. Instructions are OK by that I mean I could follow them without big issue. The system will take 4 drives, I am currently using two WD NAS red 8 TB disks, and they work good. This system also works with Windows 7 back up and File history back up. I can now know that my photos are safe without the additional cost for a cloud service and my information is private. The only real con I have is screwing the drives into the racks I would prefer a quick attach to install the drives that would make it much easier to hot swap or change out the disks.

This is my first setup that can run RAID 5 and so far I'm liking it. I'm running with five IronWolf 4TB CMR drives off of an alleged USB 3.2 PCIe card (The driver designates it as 3.1) and the sequential read/write speed is just over 220 MBps, so it's the fastest external storage solution I have so far. I wish it was faster but I'll take it for now. I don't have the money to set it up with SSDs so I'll settle for this right now. I also have a two disk RAID 0 from another manufacturer which is just 20MBps slower and has no parity protection. This RAID 5 setup will be my master archive for all my data and backups. I have it all mirrored on an 8TB drive so just in case the RAID 5 suffers a major failure I won't lose all my data. It's best to not put all your eggs in one basket, a lesson I learned a long time ago. I wish the software manager wasn't so limited and offered more functionality, like S.M.A.R.T. monitoring. It would be nice to get a heads up on potential drive failures. Should anything go wrong I'll post an update. I'm crossing my fingers.

I bought one of these in March, 2022. It failed. It wasn't warrantable. Fine. I bought another one (because my data was captive) in November 2022. It just failed (Oct, 2023). Over the past 10 or so days, I have exchanged 21 emails with the manufacturer, and the saga continues. I have been asked to disassemble the unit and clean the contacts (which I have, despite being an end-user, and not an IT company). I have been repeatedly asked the same questions (it's like nobody actually reads the preceding emails). I have been asked to test with "spare" hard drives (because your average end user just keeps hundreds of dollars of spare hard drives hanging around, right?). I have now asked to be referred to management or a complaints department twice, and have not been. My data is captive (and therefore so are certain aspects of my business), and I have no way to recover it without replacing this enclosure, so ultimately I will be forced to buy another one (which, if history is evidence, will fail within a year at my expense also). Tech support seems to be in another time zone (I'm EST/GMT-4), so responses are in the middle of the night and therefore about one per day, if I'm lucky. This product has terrible support, the warranty is about as much use as a chocolate teapot. Tech support obviously thinks they are dealing with IT professionals, while this is marketed as a consumer product. Don't waste your money. I WISH I HAD BOUGHT THE SYNOLOGY.

Worked great for me as a RAID 5 array for two years - until I upgraded to Monterey with M1. Now the RAID needs to be repaired, but the company's RAID software is not compatible with Monterey (and they have no estimated time for when an update will be released). It's a shame, because I was really happy with this product, but now it is useless. * Updating my review: I was able to rebuild my RAID 5 array with third party software. It's working again with no issues. As a hardware product, this enclosure is great. I would still recommend it; just factor in the need to purchase an additional software product (the one I bought was $250). Even if the software that came with this enclosure did eventually support Monterey in the future, I would not go back to it. TL;DR: great hardware, crappy software (but works great with third party software)