Review on TERRAMASTER D8 Thunderbolt 3 (D8-331) Professional-Grade 8-Bay Thunderbolt3 Hardware RAID Enclosure Support RAID 0/1/5/6/10/50 External Hard Drive RAID Storage (Diskless) by Mike Cassidy

Not only does this enclosure look great, it's the fastest RAID 5 solution you can get for the money. After much trial and error, I installed it on my iMac Pro with five 8TB WD Red drives. RAID-5 has 32TB and can handle a single drive failure. If you want to make the most of it, the configuration is very complex. I chose an encrypted 2TB Time Machine partition running Mac OS Extended (Journaled). Then a 30TB APFS partition with several dynamic volumes, some of which are encrypted. According to the Blackmagic Disk Speed Test app, I get read/write speeds of 525/775 MB/s on unencrypted APFS volumes, 475/725 MB/s on APFS encrypted volumes, and 375/375 MB/s on a volume without APFS , which is automatically encrypted by Time Machine. All of these Thunderbolt 3 speeds match those of SanDisk Extreme SSDs connected via USB 3.1, but at a total cost of less than $60/TB. I am very happy with this decision. The only reason I gave this product 4 stars is because their marketing materials are terrible and the unit won't turn on after a power outage. UPDATE: I may have said too soon. Today I woke up my Mac and the D5 started beeping like crazy with a red light on disk 1. So I restarted it and then it started cycling through all 5 lights and did that for hours. I found the GUI web page again and the status said the array was rebuilt and would take another 16 hours. WTF? I looked at the event log and it said disk 1 failed earlier today. For real? It was brand new! Then another screen shows all 5 hard drives are ok. What's the matter, TerraMaster? Worse, I tried to contact them through their website today and all those contact forms don't work. After 20 hours, the restore is complete and everything is working as expected again. I don't know why there was a false alarm, but I'll keep an eye on it.