TerraMaster Forum

New F4-423 arrived today and I installed the 4 "renewed" Seagate Exos X14 12TB drives I'd acquired (yes, I know they're not recommended but the price too good to ignore). After installing the drives I connected a display and keyboard via HDMI so I could watch the boot process.

On boot, it went through the expected initialization process and the drive status came up good. TOS 5 was installed and all appeared to complete OK.

Upon reboot, though, the drives appeared to initialize, throw an error for each drive, then shutdown all processes and reboot ... over and over again. At the end of this post, you'll find screen shots of the errors. Apologies for the old school method, it's the only way I could grab them.

I didn't want to just assume that the drives were bad, so I flashed the TrueNAS installer onto a thumb drive, yanked the internal thumb drive and replaced it with the TrueNAS installer. I also added a USB3-connected SSD as a temporary boot drive since I didn't have a spare m.2 drive laying around.

TrueNAS installed to the SSD, allowed me to set up a RAID5 pool and a dataset, and create an SMB share. It's survived multiple reboots without issue. I'm sorta thinking I might just stay with TrueNAS, but I understand there's some software included with TOS that automates backups ... not sure it would work with TrueNAS. Regardless, TOS did not like the Exos drives but TrueNAS had no issues with them.

Any thoughts?

Here are the errors:

Well, the fine folks at TerraMaster are telling me that this issue is caused by using memory that's not on their compatibility chart, and are apparently refusing to continue helping diagnose this issue until I remove the memory.

Hmm.

When you pick a memory for the new 423 series, make sure you follow our recommendation.
The all-new 423 series use all-new hardware and software, the uncertified third-party memory is not recommended.

TMroy wrote: ↑03 Sep 2022, 13:29 When you pick a memory for the new 423 series, make sure you follow our recommendation.
The all-new 423 series use all-new hardware and software, the uncertified third-party memory is not recommended.

If memory was the issue, wouldn't TrueNAS also experience problems? I've been running TrueNAS on the F4-423 since 4pm yesterday and it's been performing flawlessly.

Removing the Samsung 4GB DDR4 PC4-21300, 2666MHZ, 260 PIN SODIMM did allow the installation to continue to the point where I need to create a Superuser account, but at that point I cannot proceed regardless of how many different alternatives I attempt to create same. I get the authorization code, enter it, click Next, and am warned that I am about to delete all the data on my drives. The only option on that page is to click Next, and when I do that I am returned to the SuperUser Settings page.

I can only conclude that TerraMaster is now performing a hardware check on brand of installed memory, and regardless of its ability to meet your "new hardware" specs, will fail the install of TOS5.

Looks like a decent box for running TrueNAS with 3rd party memory. And given the current state of TOS5, I'm not sure I'll be missing much there, if I decide to keep it.

Fortunately I still have plenty of time to return this device.

I'm running TrueNAS now. Given the current state of TOS5 I think I'll wait until it matures a bit before trying it again.

The issue has been verified. We will fix it in the next release. The temporary solution is to reinstall 5.0.158 with the "Custom" mode, before you do this, you need to clean your browser cache. Instruction of reinstallation Download the TOS 5.0.158 installation package After the installation, you can update the system from 5.0.158 to 5.0.163

I've been running TrueNAS for two full weeks now. Zero issues, and no apparent incompatibility with the Samsung memory that has the exact same specifications as the TerraMaster modules listed on their website. Oddly, TOS5 will not run with it.

This is the same issue as I'm describing here in this post:
viewtopic.php?f=82&t=2283&start=50#p21729
Basically Terramaster is blocking ALL 3rd party memory options.