My WD PR4100 has been pretty stable over the years but, despite having 40TB of disks in there, I’ve run out of space. I *could* have tried to iSCSI some storage but I really just wanted something bigger. My primary requirement is Plex but I’d also quite like to put Twonky on there too.
I quite like the look of the Terra-Master T12-423 because it has lots of expansion space, would easily let me do RAID 6 and it looks like nice too. However, reading around on various forums there was a general consensus of opinion that the OS was pretty poor and it would be better to run UnRaid or TrueNAS on the thing. Well, I’ve always been a sucker for the underdog and quite like a challenge so that’s the device I went for.
What can I say? Well, it was packaged very nicely and in a way that appeals to my aesthetics. The tin itself is very nice too. No complaints there. They even give you a nice little screwdriver for the disks and the case. Almost everybody has a screwdriver so it’s really not necessary but it’s a really nice touch that means you have one immediately to hand.
The rest of it… well, let’s just say the comments on the forums weren’t even close. With the PR4100 you just have to slap some disks in and it’s ready to go. There’s some small configuration that can be done to personalise the device but, out of the box, it just works. The T12-423 is not like there. There’s a small USB boot loader that prompts for a disk but it doesn’t tell you what for. After giving it a disk for storage it installed the OS. That’s not quite what I wanted. Fine. Slap a couple of more disks in there and see what it does. After a good twelve hours of synchronising the test disks are ready. Great! Let’s play.
First off, basic public shared access. I want this to be a media server so I just want to be able to drop files into the shares without having to authenticate first. It did not work. Guest user enabled, read / write permission given to both the user and the group. Nothing but NTLM authentication issues. Thing is, it’s not even possible to hack around with the Samba config because the TOS constantly reverts it to what it thinks it should be.
While trying to hack around with the Samba config I found that it isn’t possible to copy files off the device using SCP because there appears to be some security program running in the background that just kills the process. It’s not even possible to use SFTP because that just segfaults. SFTP has also been configured to run on a non-standard port for “security” reasons and it’s not possible to change back.
The security limitations and alerts are so annoying. It’s not possible to have a user with a name containing “super” or “admin”. This admin account is the only account that can SSH into the box which means that it could effectively become a shared account which is even worse from a security point of view. The security alerting is just dumb. It raises alerts for things like not isolating the box on the network, using the non-standard default ports for SSH, HTTP, HTTPS and such like. It allows the easy use of both Telnet and FTP though which is just insane in today’s world.
Notifications and email are tied together so every time you change a notification setting you need to give it the email password. That makes no sense, they are distinct items and should be treated as such.
Adding disks into the array is really painful. Each disk has to be added one at a time and the array has to completely rebuild before the next one can be added in. When you’re building the initial array that’s just painful. It took a week to build an array using four 10TB disks.
Support is not very good either. When posting on the forum about the Samba issue on the public share I described the issue and everything I’d done up to that point only to get a response telling me I needed to enable the Guest user. Once I’d found out how to enable logging and posted the relevant log lines support stopped responding.
The support files the system generates are too big, or contain too many folders, to be sent through most mail servers. There is no FTP server when the files can be dropped either. Apparently it is possible to remove some of the folders from the file but if they’re not important why collect them anyway? The other issue is that the support team are based in Hong Kong so, given the time difference, it usually takes a day to get a response. If you get one at all.
All-in-all I’ve had the hardware for a week now and still not managed to move any of my media over from the PR4100. TOS really is poor and some very, very strange design choices have been made that make it really hard to work with. Support is practically non-existent and the software just isn’t fit for purpose. Still, the good thing is that it is generic x86 hardware so it’s not too hard to install something else…