A NAS is one of the most popular and powerful solutions for bringing multiple hard drives together to combine overall capacity or simply clean up your desk space, but this isn’t always the best choice for everyone. For some users, the simple choice is the most convenient, which we will focus on today thanks to this solution from TerraMaster.
It is the TerraMaster D4-300 USB 3.1 External DAS Enclosure (desktop-attached storage) and it focuses on bringing drives into a single enclosure while not requiring any software, network configuration, or RAID settings to make it happen. While also giving the ability to still go RAID if the user wants to. It simply acts like any other external drive, only you can combine four into one.
If you simply insert up to four drives and plug this enclosure in, your computer will act like up to four drives were separately plugged in. Only in this case, everything shares a single USB-C connection and (power) plug. Opening your USB ports for other accessories and cleaning up your power strips.
What’s nice about DAS enclosures is that they typically require a little less of a footprint than NAS (network-attached storage) do since they don’t require much processing power and don’t contain an internal operating system. It simply acts as an adapter to bring internal drives external.
Another bonus is the fact that they almost always contain internal fans to help keep the drives inside cool. This is something that normal external drive solutions don’t offer and cooler temperatures mean longer-lasting (usually).
DAS enclosures come in different flavors, normally covering everything from two to six bays on average. Typically, going bigger than this will land you into enterprise-level NAS products that are typically heavy server solutions.
Working with a DAS is a simple experience. They usually offer the option to hot-swap drives in and out of the unit (as long as you aren’t actively writing to them) and drives simply drop into a tray and slide right into each slot. Typically offering some kind of locking solution across the sides of the drive (this one has two plastic bars that snap into the screw holes holding it in place within the tray).
This model supports both 3.5″ and 2.5″ SATA drives in both HDD and SSD varieties. Of course, HDD is the way to go if you are hoping for as much storage capacity as possible. It offers status LEDs across the front to show which bays are active and if the unit has power overall.
Taking a look inside shows how simple things are. It is simply a SATA controller with four parts that each of the four trays slides toward, allowing each drive to plug right in. It then adapts them to USB. So outside of there being fans to keep air flowing around inside and hot air out, it really isn’t much different from a normal external drive (as mentioned).
It is capable of up to 390MB/s write and 420MB/s read via all combined drives, although this depends on the drives being used. So to hit these numbers, you clearly have to be using SSDs. For HDD, you will likely see around 125-225MB/s depending on the model of HDD being used.
We are seeing around 180-205MB/s with most of the drives (HDD) we chose to test this with. When copying large amounts of data from one HDD to another within the DAS enclosure (both drives within the same enclosure), we saw speeds drop to around 60-70MB/s. This is because Windows wants to draw the information from the first and right back into the new HDD. So the USB cable is being hit to and from at the same time. We still expected a little more than this, but it could be a limitation from the SATA controller inside.
However, DAS-to-computer or computer-to-DAS transfers work just fine when it comes to expected speeds. Speeds became even better when using an SSD. Only one of the drives we tested was a 2.5″ SSD, but the speeds were in the mid to high 300’s on average for the highs.
Like most drives, when you insert a new drive, you will have to initialize the drive and format it like you would any new drive. If you insert a drive that was already in use, you should see everything on it like nothing has changed. At least, unless you are “shucking” an external drive to get to its internal unit. In these situations, you should always back up the data somewhere else just in case as some don’t simply swap over freely. Some companies make use of their adapter inside to protect the data (or really, the drive) from someone trying to shuck it. For example, some WD (Western Digital) drives will need to be re-initialized and formatted when you rip them out of their singular enclosures and place them into a new environment.
In our case, one WD drive needed to be backed up as it needed to be reformated when inserted into this It came from an external model (an 8TB My Book model). Two other WD drives were fine, which were normal internal drives taken from previous internal use. The fourth drive was a Seagate 18TB External drive that was shucked to be placed into this, and it didn’t require any reformatting at all as everything popped right up. Thus you never know what will happen, so back everything up before inserting any drive that has content on it.
It can be common to see user reviews point out that their drives were completely ruined and had to be formatted when using a DAS solution. However, in many of these situations, it isn’t the fault of the DAS and was exactly what we described above. So many times it can come down to a lack of experience. That being said, some off-brand options can come with a little risk, leading to corrupted data over time. So these reviews should be considered as long as you fully read into it to know where in the process the data went missing (during install, or simply over time).
Our Conclusion
In our use of this enclosure, we have had nothing but great results when it comes to everything staying connected, no drives being damaged, and the user-friendliness of inserting and removing drives. The build quality of the enclosure is pretty solid outside of the trays which are all plastic (although they aren’t exactly flimsy). I just wonder about the two side pieces of each tray that help secure the drive to the tray since they do feel a little flimsy.
Speeds appear to be common for USB 3.1 (which is now known as USB 3.2 Gen 1). This includes both HDD and SSD. Our average for SSD fell slightly below the enclosure’s max specs, but it wasn’t by a lot. Just enough to affect the score slightly but not drastically.
Overall experience was enough to have earned a good deal of faith in TerraMaster and we look forward to further experience with the brand.
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Co-Authors: Ryan S.
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