TERRAMASTERD5 Thunderbolt 3 Professional-Grade 5-Bay External Hard Drive Enclosure RAID 0/RAID1/RAID5/RAID10 Hard Disk RAID Storage (Diskless)

Started off with one of these more than 2 years ago and expanded with time, daisy chaining they can copy to each other while i work. The simplicity is refreshing, raid 0 with modern HDD's gets near 500mb's per second which is fine for most of my work, 4k & 6k multicam editing etc. SSD's work great too and have gotten near 750mbps in raid 0 when ive needed it. When reviews say there are noisy they are talking about the HDD's that have been put in. The enclosure its self is basically silent when running SSD's. If you go onto their website, there is actually decent chat support. And lastly the two bay enclosure is reasonably portable which i have taken advantage of more than i thought.

Ran fine for about 8 months. Running two HD's 6Tb and 8Tb in single mode on a Mac Mini M1. The 8Tb as Time Machine. After about 10 months I noticed that the Time Machine had last backed up two months before. Ran tests on the disk and found all sorts of unrecoverable errors. Thought it might be the disk so purchased a new one. Then noticed the new disk would eject itself from time to time randomly. After a week of this it was reporting mechanical errors and is now also unusable. I can see from other reviews that this has happened to a number of other people. If you value your data, avoid this product.

I have always used Terramaster products and I never had any problems with any of them. Recently I had purchased a different brand storage device but within the 24 hours it failed , and if i hadnt backed my filesup I would have lost all my data I I never had any problems with any of my Terramaster products. I know they are a little more expansive than some other brands but you certainly get what you pay for .The most important thing I expect from a storage device is , I am a full time photographer and I have a very high turnover of files, so the device needs to keep up with my demands. it needs to be fast and reliable.After an extensive search and reading some reviews I decided to go with the D2 and I dont regret it. It is quiet, it is fast, so far so good, and hopefully time will tell how reliable it is. I will try and give some updates after a while of using it.

Bought this unit as a replacement for a Drobo 5D (Drobo gone out of business), as it is a RAID 5 unit and directly attached to my Mac with a Thunderbolt 3 connection. Very happy with unit, internal drives insert very easily and make a solid connection. Only issue is that the driver software for the unit was a bit difficult to install and didn't work straight off on my Mac running the latest OS but fixed in the end, hence the one lower rating.

I have this set up as raid 0 for bays 1 and 2 and single discs for the other 3. Using a couple of WD Red Pro disks in in the raid 0 configuration as my FCPX library working drive, and attached via Thunderbolt 3, this set up allows me to edit in 4k in real time, with no stuttering or lags, even when applying complex effects. I use the other 3 bays for original media and back up, so I have everything in one package. The set up was very easy, no special skills required. I cannot comment on the longevity of the system of course as it has only been running for a few weeks, but I suspect it would be the disks themselves (bought separately), that are the possible failure points. But as long as a proper backup system is used, there will be no problems. I hope this is useful for others wishing to use this for intensive video editing. If you are only editing in HD, then the cheaper USB C version of this would be more than adequate, as it is the disks themselves that are the speed limiting factor (unless you use SSDs), or if you were using 4K but happy to use proxy media.

I wanted to come and say its brilliant and I have no concerns. Not quite how it is, after only a month od use I have had a worrying Drive failure and to be honest my confidence in this unit has taken a hit. Service response via email and chat has not really got to a conclusion I think returns my confidence.The initial setup with 5 x Seagate Ironwolf Pro 8TB drive went without issue. Setup as RAID 5 (4 data + 1 for parity - no spare). The transfer of my photos took a reasonably quick time from the other drives I was using and again there were no incidents. The 32TB capacity was then sitting around 25TB.Initial Blackmagic speed tests were good, and then dropped as the drive became fuller.Issue was after a trip away for 10 days I came back with my Mac Studio offline and the alarm on the Terramaster. There was also a orange led next to the D1 position. I tried restarting and also used the RAID Manage Pro app to see what the event log said, and it said the D1 had failed and the attempts to rebuild got 1 or 2% complete and then failed again. Support got the logs and other data and suggested I replace the faulty drive. I didn't have another so I had to buy another. On replacing that a few days later it failed to rebuild with the new drive. After multiple attempts and, at the time, no support answering chat, I decided to return the original HDD to then see it start the rebuild again and, for some reason, complete. I now have the array back running with no errors, but it leaves me worried it may happen again, and I am still not wiser about whether it was the Raid Array issue or a Seagte drive issue. I also now have a new, just opened, 8TB drive I didn't need, or do I?So, the unit looks good, and when it works, it's good, but the reliability of a month-old product in charge of protecting precious files is not where I wanted it to be. Approach this unit cautiously, and if your files are that important to you, perhaps look elsewhere.