My home media server is running short on storage space and unfortunately the cost of storage (even for mechanical drives) has increased noticeably. A 4-terabyte WD Red drive that sold for just over $100 a few months ago now retails near $200. To work around these market conditions, I decided to repurpose four older 4-terabyte NAS drives—two WD Reds and two Seagate IronWolfs—that I had previously pulled from other projects.
In my latest Gadget Picks channel video, I test out the new enclosure I’ll be placing them in – a TerraMaster D4-320 (compensated affiliate link). While the D4-320 visually resembles a network-attached storage server, it functions strictly as a direct-attached USB-C 3.2 enclosure. It accommodates up to four SATA mechanical or solid state hard drives. The single USB-C port on the rear supports theoretical transfer speeds up to 10 gigabits per second.
Installation is a tool-less process. The front trays pull out, and plastic side rails secure the drives in place, though screws are provided for those who prefer a more permanent mounting method. The unit supports hot-swapping, allowing drives to be exchanged while the system is running, provided the host operating system supports the action.
During my initial testing on a Mac, I monitored the unit’s power consumption and data transfer rates. With all four mechanical drives installed, the enclosure briefly drew nearly 90 watts as the disks spun up, before settling to an idle draw of roughly 27 watts. When formatted individually, a single drive wrote data at approximately 160ish megabytes per second while consuming 12 watts, and read data at about the same rate.
Because the D4-320 does not feature built-in hardware RAID controller capabilities, it presents the disks as a simple group of independent drives. To test the enclosure’s maximum throughput with mechanical disks, I utilized macOS software to configure the four drives into a striped RAID 0 array.
This configuration is not advisable for critical data due to the risk of total data loss if a single drive fails. But it serves as a practical benchmark as RAID 0 can make use of the aggregate total amount of storage space and get the performance benefit of all four drives as data is striped across each.
Operating as a single 16-terabyte volume in RAID 0, the enclosure achieved read and write speeds between 550 and 560 megabytes per second. Power consumption during these sustained read and write cycles measured approximately 33.7 watts.
With the enclosure functioning properly and the repurposed drives verified, the next phase of this project involves connecting the hardware to my existing Unraid server. This will add 16 terabytes of capacity to the current storage pool and provide a demonstration of how the Unraid handles capacity expansions.
Stay tuned!
Disclosure: Terramaster provided the enclosure free of charge. No other compensation was received and they have not reviewed or approve this content prior to publication.