TerraMaster D8 review, 8 drives in one USB enclosure 

I think it could work fine in this use case with a Mac mini. A few things I'd note are the 2012 Mac mini only has 5gbit USB link, so that will limit max speeds. Also if your not using the M.2 slots I'd look at other options that are HDD only.

@@ElectronicsWizardry thank you. what model would you suggest if i don’t need the m.2 slots on this D8 model? how about the QNAP TR-004 4 Bay USB Type-C Direct Attached Storage (DAS) with hardware RAID?

There is no visible power less capacitors on this board. Since there are no additional RAM on these USB converter chips, there is likely very little data stored on here other than a minimal data buffer. One other data loss concern is if they handle sync requests correctly. I didn't check this in my testing, but I have seen some USB drives that appear to fake the sync commands, but can't comment on this specific enclosure. I'd like to look more into how devices handle unexpected power outages and data loss, but need to plan a methodology to do it correctly. Let me know if you have any ideas about how this can be done well. These converts don't put any extra formatting data on the drives, so you can plug them directly to a motherboard and mount the exact same filesystem and data.

@@ElectronicsWizardry that was interesting to hear about the possibility of that sync issue. Never heard of it or noticed activity on my removable drives after sync completion. Reliable or maybe better said comparable testing of these problems is I suppose virtually impossible. I don't know if it's possible to run like script that sync's and right after completion would essentially hard reset that usb interface? But for like realife writing to drive and essentially simulating powerloss or something, can't think of any method to compare between devices. Good point btw that it would be possible to recover data from drive in computer. Indeed on that regard it should be virtually identical to recover data from device like that or internal drive, stupid me. Also iirc quite many ssd's have internals designed that in case powerloss they flush cache before circuitry runs out of power. Should actually check out of curiosity that in what kind of "bursts" data is transmitted via controllers and if there are any safeties involved. I'd suppose there has to be some "check bits" involved in transmission. Though it goes so deep that I'll likely dropout very early on when looking into this kind of stuff 😀

Since USB is used for the drives instead of PCIe, it wouldn't use any PCIe lanes, and this can be nice for adding drives to a system that doesn't have the lanes/slots to do so. The max bandwidth would be slower than if PCIe was used directly, but in many workloads a USB SSD is plenty fast.

@@ElectronicsWizardry Thanks for answering! And wasn't aware that usb controllers do not take any pcie lanes. Learned that now.

@Reddepex this really depends on how the usb controller is connected to the rest of the system. Often usb is integrated onto the chipset of cpu so no lanes are used. One other thing to note is the usb controller uses the same amount of lanes if a device is connected or not so adding a drive like this one won’t use more lanes than the empty port in most configurations.

The threaded insert the screw goes into seems to be permanently attached, with no easy way to remove it. While the cooling holes for the drives seem to be in the right spot for smaller sizes, there isn't a easy way to use them.

ZFS should work fine without trim as to my knowledge ZFS only uses trim with the zpool trim action, and doesn't affect data stored on disk. But the performance impact of no trim may be significant depending on the drive.

I ponder if the RAID chip is cheaper than another USB hub chip? Using just 2 USB hub chips they ended up with an odd amount of ports to attach the even amount of drives to.

Agreed. FYI I contacted TerraMaster support over chat on their website. They said the unit now supports TRIM, including the units being sold on Kickstarter.

Thanks for that update. Glad they fixed one of my biggest complaints with the unit.

Why don't you give him suggestions on subjects on Proxmox you would like to see? There is only so much that can be said about a software. The man gotta eat.

Good idea