[Help] Painful entry in the TM world

[grosminet750]

Hi folks,

I am new to Terramaster but not to NAS (I switched from home-made to drobo to synology, and now thinking to moving to TM)
This week, I received my brand new F6-424 MAX and started setup process (no SSD added, no RAM added)
At first, all went fine - I had TOS installed (was pretty fast), created a 3 disk TRAID pool, a volume and I could read and write data through the network. At this point, user is happy. Simple, straightforward.
The morning of day 2, the appliance complained that a disk had failed during the night and needed replacement - ok, disk failures happen.
The problem is that volume and pool had disappeared (so did data as no volume existed) - I really mean disappeared, not show as broken or else, no, just nothing, just as if I had not created them.
My concerns : first, a single disk failure should not cause data loss so I would expect to replace the disk and keep things going
Second, even if two disks had failed, what would make my data lost, I would expect to still see my pool and volume, as broken or unueseable but present.
So whatever the case, this did not sound correct - hopefully, no problem for data loss, I'm stil running on syno, just experiencing TM at this stage.
Considering this, I decided to restart it from the start with a factory reset.
To make sure I really started from a fresh start, I reformatted all disks (used my syno for that) - by the way, no disk had any issue
I switched the appliance on with no disk.
Looked like it was just out of the box - TM asked for disks - provided 3 x 10 Tb disks (to really make it sure, I kept the disk TM reported as broken aside (even if I think it is perfectly ok)) so we have 3 newly formatted disks, checked approved by syno)
TOS install started- says 10 minutes needed.
It is underway for 4 hours now - progress bar indicates 31% so a 12 hour process if progress bar is correct and completes
A bit strange anyway
why does a second install takes so much longer than a first one ?
I would expect the disk lights to blink at high rate as the install process in the only task - first led is almost steady (off/on maybe every one or two seconds), leds 2 and 3 are completely steady
my understanding is that the installation is in progress but at an extremely slow pace (am I wrong ?)
of course, no ssh available at this point so no way to investigate anything (if any, let me know !).
Plugged a screen on HDMI port - some messages were displayed at boot time but that stopped soon after boot - nothing added during the last hours - so no clue here
Many things are strange (the failed disk which is in perfect shape, the disapperance of pool, volume (and data as a consequence), the inconsistency of install duration) - all this does not make me feel confident in the appliance at this point.
Should this be considered as normal in the TM world or do I have a problem with my device ?
Or I did something wrong ?

As I'm new to TM, anyone having an expert advice to provide welcome...

[grosminet750]

After 6 hours, init failed (42% according to jauge)
No message on console.
Message on GUI is vague and says (my translation, message is in French) : please reboot device and restart - if problems continues, might be a problem with hard disk. We suggest to initialize it and try again. If still a problem, you should replace hard disk.

Port 8181 not responding (normal as TOS not installed)

Keeping changing disks and trying again and again will probably lead to nothing new.

Mr Terramaster, please help me !

[crisisacting]

Posting here may garner assistance from fellow users, but if you need immediate assistance, you need to contact support via one of the addresses @ https://www.terra-master.com/global/contact-us/

Or use the live chat when it's available on their main site.

[EthanLiu]

We are very sorry for the poor user experience! We have received your feedback and confirmed that this problem is caused by a special situation during the initialization process. Our technical team is currently actively fixing it.

Cause of the problem:
After investigation, it was found that the TOS installation package download speed was too slow due to unstable network connection, which ultimately caused the initialization to fail.

Solution:
Please follow the steps below to complete the initialization successfully:
1. Download the installation package: Please visit our Download Center first and download the complete TOS installation package to your local computer.
2. Select manual mode: In the initialization interface, select "Custom Initialization" mode.
3. Upload the installation package: In this mode, manually upload the TOS installation package you just downloaded to the local computer.
With this method, you can avoid the network download link and directly use the local installation package to complete the initialization settings of the device.

[grosminet750]

Thanks to both of you for your fast response and help

The week end is now over and I have to go back to work so I will have little time to spend on my TM so I might not be able to take new actions immediately but I will let you know when I can.

[grosminet750]

Hey folks,

I found some time to give my TM a second chance but it gets worse, oops !
I retried the online TOS install and it worked flawlessly. Let's say it's my network (doubtful as no other device (and I have a couple of them) complained but never mind)
At first step, there was 1 10Tb disk
(one pool, one volume, TRAID mode, 9.09 Tb available for data - perfect - the single disk is marked as "system disk", ok
Added a second 10Tb disk - TM said it would require 27 hours, was ready after 17h
Pool size unchanged (9.09 Tb) - complies with calculator - ok
Added a third 10Tb disk - TM said it would require 27 hours, was ready after 25 hrs
Pool size now 18.17 Tb (did not change the volume, had in mind to do that when pool has final size) - calculator says 20 Tb in that configuration so it's ok,
Added a fourth 10 Tb disk, TM said 27 hours again , required 37 hours this time
Jauge kept moving from 0% to 100%, received completion notification in the dashboard, all sounds good and same as previous runs,
Problem: pool size is unchanged (18.17 Tb) - for 4 10Tb disks, should have raised to around 10 Tb more - not good
No error anywhere, all green everywhere, just the size issue...
Decided to reboot the appliance
Used the iOS app to request reboot
Reboot started but web ui never started, the console is not displaying "login:" , seems to be stucked somewhere
Pressed the stop button (short press), beeped, shutdowned
waited for 10 seconds, pressed start button
Beep, restart successful
BUT I HAVE NO MORE POOL, NO MORE VOLUME, ALL IS GONE
In the "Pool" menu, i see the open box but the "Create" button is inactive
All disks visible and marked as "Good"
I'm still in the (painful yet working) setup process but I do not intend to leave my data to an unreliable appliance
I am patiently doing very basic and simple operations (plug a disk, add to the pool, wait) , the appliance is behind an UPS in a cool place , all disks are in good condition, no one uses the device, the only tasks it has to perform is build the array and respond to the GUI. Could hardly be a more gentle environment.
I have an ssh access and can provide any file or dump you wish to troubleshoot if you are willing to investigate
This time, I am sure I did nothing wrong (plug - extend - wait, very basic operations) so there is a software or hardware issue but as GUI provides no information of any kind, not easy to know
I hope you will be able to give me a path to recovering my pool because I cannot go on with vanishing pools for no reason (second time in a row) - to be honest, I'm really considering returning to synology - this is outdated overpriced hardware, but it works ...
Looking forward to hearing from you !

[grosminet750]

I have sent the story to support at terramaster.com also

[grosminet750]

If ever someone is interested in the end of the story...

My guess was that the problem came from the software, not from the hardware, so I searched for third party software that could run on the Terramaster, and found Unraid, so I gave it a try.

Things are very different - now everything works as advertised, no surprise, no loss, and for 8 months now, not a single issue.

My opinion is that TerraMaster is a hardware company, they build very good and reliable appliances but they should leave software to software companies, like Unraid. With such a combo of good hardware and good sotftware, it rocks ! At then end, even with the price of software I had to buy on top of TM, this is still higher a price/performance than Syno so I warmly recommend TM hardware + Unraid.

[TMzethar]

Hi dear customer,
It appears you may have contacted us via our support email or Live Chat.
Since the storage pool issue you mentioned is uncommon and the information provided is limited, we have not yet been able to identify the cause.
If you could have provided more information at the time, such as system reports, I believe we could have resolved the issue quickly.