How well does that work? The hardware is as I said in the review pretty solid overall and it's really a shame that TOS doesn't take more advantage of it.
However, I would personally advice against spending this much money on something like this, just to run a third party OS, as a chunk of the price tag is TOS and support from TerraMaster during at least the first couple of years. Sadly there's nothing quite like you can buy without an OS or with a chassis though.
For context, before the F8 I had a shared DS920+, but due to the workloads I moved onto that box over time, its drives (4x Toshiba N300s, cheap, reliable and
loud compared to similar 3.5-inch 7200rpms) would be online all day, all the time, and the noise was getting too annoying. I don't have a good place to store computers running 24/7 without killing either networking or thermals, so I started to look at some SSD-only options:
- NVMe drives are an order of magnitude faster than comparable SATA 2.5" and not that much more expensive in my country if you ignore the ungooglable "this will store your data trust me bro" options, so NVMe it is.
- One problem: It's easy to find cheap SATA carriers (either a prebuilt NAS, or you can just get PCIe SATA controller cards with more ports than you can use), but much harder to get lots of NVMe slots.
- You can build a SFF PC and throw in some cheap PCIe - M.2 "splitter" cards, but most of them require bifurcation support on the motherboard, and you will not get that on most consumer boards.
- The cheapest PCIe x8 - 4x M.2 carrier board that does not require bifurcation (= contains a PCIe switch, like ASM2824 or Broadcom's PEX switches like you have on HighPoint cards) is ~510PLN (~120EUR, ~135USD), plus however many M.2 slots you have on your motherboard, and that would cover what I need pretty well.
- Then the networking, 1GbE is not a lot even for 4 HDDs, so you either shell out more for a board that comes with 2.5/5/10GbE or buy an extra NIC. By this point you're out of PCIe slots on ITX boards, so you probably want mATX anyways.
- Also, this is running 24/7 in a room where I spend most of my day, so it should be whisper-quiet.
Combine all that and you end up with a big enough price tag for a physically large box. And then the F8 Plus shows up, with a low-power but competent 8-core Atom, 8 integrated NVMe slots, 10GbE, a SO-DIMM slot (small Synology boxes often have a SO-DIMM slot in addition to the soldered on-board memory, so if that dies, it's a problem) and it all fits onto a bookshelf to boot. The price is kinda... eeeeh, but if it's to run for 5+ years, I'll take it.
Right now I'm running TrueNAS on it, a few app containers, SMB and NFS shares for other computers and regular backups. Anything I want from other computers maxes out the NIC at 2.5G on the router right away. Searching through the storage (via SSH) usually maxes out the CPU faster than the storage. Seeking around larger 4K video files over the network is nearly instant, as if they were on a local drive. The only thing that gets it hotter and audible on a day to day basis is Syncthing processing a few gigs of changes in one go.
The biggest drawback so far is that you either have to sacrifice one of the NVMe slots for the OS or use the internal USB... 2.0... port for the OS storage, and there's not enough physical space to put anything nicer than one of those tiny monolithic flash drives (got a Fit Plus 64GB in there). TrueNAS wears it down with regular writes over time, but it's been going for 6 months so fingers crossed it stays alive. With something more custom, you could make it act just as a boot drive (TOS does it this way - the OS is installed onto the drives after partitioning, the USB key comes with just the bootloader and initial setup binaries). One more thing of concern is that corrected PCIe AER errors show up in the kernel logs once every few weeks - according to some folks online that sometimes happens on that PCIe switch, so it's "a cause for concern, not panic" - ZFS never complained about any errors, it's been alright so far.
