If it had RAID 5 and Thunderbolt, this product would be much more exciting.
The suggested MSRP is $299, but on Kickstarter, one can be secured for just $199.
Is this a good deal, or did TerraMaster miss the biggest open goal in the DAS market today?
As the name suggests, it supports five drives in two SATA drives and three NVMe module configurations.
Thats the same price as the QNAP TR-004 four-bay SATA DAS that doesnt support NVMe drives.
TerraMaster provides a tiny screwdriver to set a pot for the chosen RAID mode for the drives installed.
Once the mode is set you use the reset hole to instruct the machine to reorganise those two drives.
You’re not alone if that doesnt sound like what you expected.
How it uses RAID was one of the bits that genuinely made us scratch our heads on several occasions.
There are two disappointments here.
But thats theoretical, and the reality is much less.
In our tests using some WD 500GB Blue drives, it achieved around 180MB/s reads and 177MB/s writing.
That suggests some caching of the NVMe subsystem on the D8 Hyprid on the writing side of the processing.
Weve seen Thunderbolt-connected NVMe drives that can achieve 3,500MB/s using this technology’s 40GB/s mode.
Thats what people want, but the D8 Hybrid isnt that.
The concept of selecting RAID modes using a tiny screwdriver seems remarkably old-school.
A software tool running on the connected machine would surely be a better option.
What is a hands on review?
It may be just a few moments, or a few hours.
For more information, seeTechRadar’s Reviews Guarantee.
