TerraMaster says its new D5 Hybrid is the industry’s first to combine two series of slots for both standard HDDs and M.2 NVMe SSDs to support both “hot and cold” storage.
The D5 Hybrid is not TerraMaster’s first drive that supports both NVMe M.2 SSDs and SATA HDDs/SSDs, but it is the first that is made for active, daily use. Earlier this month, the company announced the F4-424 Pro NAS to challenge Synology’s domination of the network attached storage market, combining an 8-core 8-thread CPU, integrated GPU, and 32GB of RAM with the ability to use two NVMe slots for SSD caching.
It’s latest drive is made more for active use than a NAS is and promises to leverage the benefits of the large and more affordable capacities of HDDs and combine those with the high-speed performance of M.2 SSDs, simultaneously.
TerraMaster says the D5 Hybrid offeres up to 10 Gbps transfer bandwidth through its USB 3.2 Gen 2 protocal. With two HDDs set to RAID 0 — which offers no backup protection but prioritizes speed — the enclosure can reach up to 521MB/s. With two SSDs in RAID 0, the read speed can reach 960MB/s and using NVMe M.2 SSDs, it can reach up to 980MB/s. Of note, RAID configuration for the HDDs is managed via a hardware switch.
It doesn’t just stop at USB 3.2 Gen 2, however. The company says that it offers compatibility with a variety of protocols including USB 4 and Thunderbolt. That said, “compatability” doesn’t mean full support, so photographers should not expect the high speeds that come with USB 4 or Thunderbolt 4 even if cables and connections will work.
The array and its management tool are compatible with Windows 7 and later, macOS X 10.6 and later, and Linux Ubuntu 16/18/20.
Speed aside, TerraMaster is also touting what it calls “2+3 RAID Array Mode,” which is exclusive to this platform given its unique arrangement. By using two SATA HDDs or SSDs in the two main trays, users can then configure those in RAID 1 for simple backup while using the three NVMe M.2 SSD slots exclusively for fast access to data. The company refers to this as one drive that to provide users with quick access to “hot” data (files actively in use) and “cold” data (files that are just being stored, not actively used).
TerraMaster’s D5 Hybrid is available for $220, but that does not include any HDDs or SSDs.
Image credits: TerraMaster