TerraMaster Forum

Hello all,
I've been using an F4-423 with 4x 8-TB Ironwolves in a RAID5 array ("TRAID") just fine. I recently got a D4-320 as I was under the assumption that it could be used to "expand" the F4; or at least, I saw multiple mentions of it by TerraMaster, with the caveat that the D4 only shows disks individually so any RAID must be handled on the host. However, I spent the better part of yesterday trying to figure it out and I'm very close to just sending it back.

Note that:
1) at this time I only have one additional 8-TB Ironwolf to use in it, and no other disks I can spare just for tests;
2) the F4-423 runs TOS 6.0.555;
3) the D4-320 works perfectly if connected to my Macs.

When I connect the D4 to the F4, the new disk shows up as a USB disk. If I format it as EXT4, I get the (common?) issue of TOS crashing when the shares are listed. This is something that I already reported (viewtopic.php?p=40424) as soon as I updated to TOS 6 a few weeks ago, using a standard USB disk. At least another user reported the exact same problem on a different machine (viewtopic.php?p=40762&hilit=refcount_t% ... low#p40762).

Fair enough, my goal is to eventually add more disks to the D4 so I created a storage pool on it, and then a volume, and a shared folder on top of that. However, whether I create the pool as TRAID or as a single disk, the SMB speed is awful and it ultimately dies. This is different from the well known woes of using macOS's Finder; this happens even when bypassing the Finder entirely, e.g. using `cp` directly: I get a burst of a decent speed for the disk (around 120 MB/s) for a few seconds, then it grinds to zero, then it has another burst, and so on. After a handful of bursts, the SMB mount is lost. It's been so bad that I haven't even had a chance to try downloading from the D4 via the F4, as I have never been able to upload more than around 800 MB (!) to it before it became unstable.

The F4-423 does list the D4 as connected at 10 Gbit (`lsusb -tvv`), but then again at this point even a 5 Gbit connection would be enough. I am using the original USB C cable that came with the D4, however with a USB C to A adapter to fit the F4; not sure if that could possibly make a difference, though. I'll order a proper USB C to A cable in the meantime, but if anyone has any idea about how I could address this, I'd be most thankful. It's truly frustrating and it's making me question how reliable this would be in the long term.

Thanks!

The issue might lie in the quality of the USB connection. Since the F4-423 does not have a USB-C port, while the D4-320 comes with a USB-C to USB-C cable by default, I'm wondering how you connected the D4-320 to the F4-423. It is recommended that you purchase an original USB-A to USB-C cable.

Hi TMRoy, thank you for your reply. I used two different adapters that I had (one by Hama and one by Duttek) and both show that the connection is at 10 Gbit by running lsusb -tvv. I just ordered a 10 Gbit, USB-IF certified USB A-C cable from Amazon, will report back as soon as it's delivered and I can run some tests!

The new cable definitely helped.
I'm not sure why it created "Volume 3" instead of "Volume 2" (is there any way to rename it?) since I had disconnected the other disk and rebooted it, but it seems to be working well so far. Thank you TMroy!

Regarding the issue of volume names not being in order, you can try restarting your NAS and then recreate the volumes.

It is possible that you had created Volume 2, but Volume 2 was not formally deleted, so the system retains the Volume 2 configuration. In this case, the new volume you create can only be named backwards. Changing the volume name is not supported.