TerraMaster Forum

Converting from Synology DS216j to Terramaster F4-210. Running TOS 4.1.24.

I copied all the files from my Synology over onto a Single disk on the Terramaster. Silly me, I thought that I could then add the other 3 disks and Boom have RAID 5.

But NO. The UI prevents you from doing the logical thing. These are the only steps you can perform:

From Single Disk, you can "Upgrade RAID" by adding ONLY 1 DISK. The dialog asks you to confirm "Single Disk" but actually then converts it to RAID 1.
16 hours later, I have RAID 1. (On the slightly positive side it said it was going to take 684 hours to resync)

Now I think, I can add the other 2 drives. But NO:

From RAID 1, you once again can only "Upgrade RAID" by adding ONE disk. This time the dialog asks you to confirm RAID 1, but actually starts converting to RAID 5. This time it says it will take 1000 hours.

Presumably when this finishes (hopefully in less than 1000 hours), I will be able to add a 4th disk. How absurd is that.

By the way, in retrospect I could have/should have created an empty RAID 5 system with 3 drives and then COPIED my single drive into it. That would have taken a lot less time (I think). But despite 3 separate inquiries with Support about this process, they NEVER suggested that as the right way to do it. Only that "when I added the new disks the Edit option would appear and I would be able to convert to RAID 5" (which of course was not true).

Hi, sorry to tell you that's the situation.
Single could be upgrade to RAID1 only, and RAID1 could be upgraded to RAID5, but only one drive could be added at one time.

You could set up your TNAS with two pairs of RAID, 1 hard drive as single, and three hard drives as RAID5, it's surely ok. Maybe the support misunderstood your meaning.