INTRODUCTION

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

    Weather you have a very large digital media collection or you just need lots of storage space for your work and/or backups then pairing your hard drives with a multi-bay external hard drive enclosure is always the easiest and most affordable way out since they combine high storage capacity with extremely fast read and write speeds. Luckily although in the past not many manufacturers saw fit to have multi-bay models with space for more than just two drives as part of their product lines lately that has changed since more and more seem to favor them. Much like with everything else in the electronics market you can get more bays as you go higher in price and since currently 4/5 bay external drive enclosures seem to be more popular among consumers we decided to gather and test some such models the first of which is the latest D5-300 USB 3.0 External Hard Drive RAID Enclosure by TerraMaster.

   TerraMaster is a professional brand which focuses on storage products, including network attached storage and direct attached storage, which is sold in more than 40 countries and regions. Products of TerraMaster are mainly designed for customers such as small and medium businesses and home users. With its core competitiveness in excellent hardware design and strong software developing ability, TerraMaster aims to provide customers with excellent products that offer reliability and value. TerraMaster has focused on the development of storage technology for 16 years. TerraMaster continues to explore storage technology and applications, such as how to create more functionality and value to storage products and make storage application easier, more convenient, safer and faster to provide customers with a complete, reliable and trusted data storage solution.

   The D5-300 may not be the only 5-bay USB 3.0 external drive enclosure available in the market today (supports both 3.5" and 2.5" drives) but it's certainly one of the very few (if not the only one) that uses a type-C connector and supports RAID 0/5 and large modes for the drives used. TerraMaster claims that by using USB 3.0 the device has a maximum read performance of 210MB/s and a write performance of 190MB/s and so although we've seen better there's no denying that it's a very fast enclosure. For good or bad TerraMaster has equipped the D5-300 only with USB 3.0 so although we can understand that going for the most popular type was expected that means people who may want an enclosure with multiple connections (like eSATA and or Thunderbolt 3) will have to look elsewhere. To keep the temperature of the drives inside in check Terra Master has used aluminum for the enclosure and has outfitted it with two 80mm rear exhaust fans. Time to dig a little bit deeper and see what the D5-300 USB 3.0 External Hard Drive RAID Enclosure is all about.

 

 

SPECIFICATIONS AND FEATURES

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

PACKAGING AND CONTENTS

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 TerraMaster uses a large box to ship the D5-300 that just has their logo on all sides and a sticker with the product serial number and barcode on the left.

 

 

The enclosure is placed inside a plastic bag and between two foam spacers (the bundle is placed inside a second cardboard box).

 

 

Inside the box TerraMaster has placed the D5-300 with its power adapter and two power cords (UK/EU), type-c to type-c USB 3.0 cable, type-c to USB 3.0 cable, two plastic bags with mounting screws for 3.5/2.5" drives and a quick installation guide.

 

 

THE D5-300

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 The enclosure of the D5-300 is made out of aluminum and is currently available in silver color. In terms of size the D5-300 measures 227mm in depth, 225mm in width and 136mm in height and weighs 2.16Kg (without any drives).

 

 

TerraMaster has printed their logo on both sides of the enclosure.

 

 

With a total of 5 drive trays you can currently store up to 50TB of data in the D5-300.

 

 

The power on/off button and LED are placed at the front of the enclosure right beneath 5 HDD activity LEDs (this small panel is made out of plastic and not aluminum).

 

 

Unfortunately the drive trays are also made out of plastic and not aluminum as the rest of the enclosure (still they are quite sturdy).

 

 

Turning the enclosure around the two 80mm exhaust fans are certainly not something we see a lot with 4/5 bay enclosures (they are quite silent too).

 

 

 

At the rear we also see the Type-C USB 3.0 connector and the DC in.

 

 

The D5-300 sits ontop 5 rubber feet and is perforated at the base.

 

 

HW RAID MANAGER

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

To download the HW RAID Manager you will need to visit the TerraMaster product support page as seen above.

 

 

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen this software so once again all the drives present are listed on the main tab.

 

 

Via the event viewer you can track all your choices and problems if any.

 

 

TerraMaster markets the D5-300 as a RAID0/5/LARGE enclosure but as you can see it also supports Clone and RAID 3/10 modes.

 

 

TEST BED

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

TESTING METHODOLOGY

 

   Complicating things is not really our way so once again our testing procedure will be almost identical to the one we use with external docking stations. However since we are talking about an multi-bay 3.5" external enclosures this time over we will be using one or more (depends on the mode) Seagate Constellation ES.3 4TB SATA III hard disk drives since mechanical drives are obviously what people will use more with such devices (besides in quad+ enclosures these should pretty much max out the performance of the onboard controller). Our standard selection of benchmark suites is used here as well for both single and RAID 0 testing including the famous HD Tach RW (Long Bench 32mb Zones), HD Tune Pro (read/write -when possible- speeds), Sisoftware Sandra Pro (Read/Write -also when possible- speeds), AIDA64 (Linear Read/Random Read), Crystal Disk Mark x64 (100MB/1000MB read/write speeds) and finally the quite outdated yet highly reliable ATTO 2.47 (Max Read/Max Write speeds).

   Temps as usual were recorded using the latest version of Hard Disk Sentinel along with the sensors provided by AIDA64. Every test was repeated for a total of 6 times and after that the average (not peak) performance numbers were recorded into our graphs. As always every test was performed in a fresh installation of Microsoft Windows 7 Service Pack 1 with every update installed up to September 15th 2016.

    * For this review we used 5 Seagate Constellation ES.3 4TB SATA III drives.

 

 

TEST RESULTS - AIDA64 / ATTO

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

TEST RESULTS - HD TACH RW / HD TUNE PRO

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

TEST RESULTS - SISOFTWARE SANDRA PRO / CRYSTAL DISK MARK X64

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

TEST RESULTS – TEMPERATURES

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

CONCLUSION

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

   TerraMaster may have been around for the better part of two decades but it’s not really a well-known manufacturer in the market so when we got the D5-300 we honestly didn’t know what to expect. Sure building a good enclosure is not rocket-science but trust me when I say that there are quite a few manufacturers out there that have failed to impress us with their offerings. With that out of the way as you can all see performance is very good and in almost all of our tests we even managed to surpass the 210MB/s read and 190MB/s write advertised by TerraMaster (we surpassed 260MB/s in ATTO). USB 3.0 can go even higher and it should with 5 Constellation ES.3 4TB drives in RAID0 but even so the D5-300 is currently the fastest enclosure in our charts (to be fair however it’s also the only 5 bay one). Unlike many multi-bay enclosures in the market the D5-300 is also silent thanks to the two 80mm exhaust fans TerraMaster has used so you don’t have to worry about noise levels. Unfortunately we don’t like the drive trays used not only because they are made out of plastic but also because they require screws for the drives (some enclosures currently available use tool-less systems for the drives). I also would like to see an LCD screen and buttons on the enclosure for configuring RAID instead of just the software suite so I hope TerraMaster takes this into consideration with upcoming models.

   Multi-bay external HDD enclosures are considered special peripherals and as such they are not aimed at casual consumers on a very tight budget. To be more precise the D5-300 by TerraMaster currently retails for USD249.99 inside the USA (Amazon.com) and for 233Euros inside the EU (Amazon.co.uk) a price tag which is set quite a bit upwards than what for example SilverStone asks for their 4 bay TS432U model (still it's reasonable for a 5 bay model). At the end of the day however you can use the aluminum D5-300 to store up to 50TB of data with very fast read & write speeds and that’s more than enough for it to get our Golden Award.

PROS

- Build Quality
- Excellent Performance (Up To 260MB/s)
- 5x3.5”/2.5" Drive Bays
- USB 3.0 Type-C Connectivity
- LARGE & RAID 0/5/10 Modes
- Dual 80mm Silent Exhaust Fans
- Control Software

 

 

CONS

- Plastic HDD Trays
- No JBOD Mode
- Only USB 3.0 Connectivity