Unraid on Terramaster bargain NAS F4-220 chassis

jfinnie

Been looking to build an Unraid box for a while, just didn't want to give up the cupboard space to a whole PC.  Not a fan of RAID5 on tiny little NAS boxes, so Unraid seems like a great idea in terms of disaster recovery.

Anyway, just picked up one of these 4 bay chassis from Amazon for £230 (actually £224 to me as it coincided with a giftcard topup bonus offer).  I had an eye on this unit as I see there have been several folk who have installed other OS's on it (it even has an internal VGA header in case you can't work headless!)
This guy installed Windows Server 2016 on his (yuk!)
                               
But I fancied Unraid, so bought it on a flyer (Amazon return policy helps!).  Already have 4x 8TB WD drives that I'd bought when on offer at Amazon as external USB drives, and shucked.

The 4 bay unit is particularly interesting as there is actually a 5th internal SATA connector on the backplane (just no tray supplied / front panel blanked off) - I intend to stick a SATA SSD in it for use as a cache volume.  The 5 bay chassis is almost 50% more cost...!

Anyway, got Unraid running on it in about 15 minutes.  Just had to build the USB stick using the Unraid installer (I used a new 16GB stick I had - kept the original stick in case of return...) and renamed the "EFI-" folder to "EFI" on the drive to allow the Terramaster to boot - didn't even need the VGA cable as it immediately sprung into life and became visible on the network.

Out of the box the fan control was annoying (ramping up and down rapidly) but installing the Dynamix Auto Fan control and Dynamix System Temperature plugins, with a little bit of command line setup to detect the fan controller (using command sensors-detect over SSH terminal and follow the prompts) and I have fan control working based on drive temperatures.

So far the only the only other annoyance I can see is that the drive activity and network LEDs on the front panel don't seem functional.  Will have to see if I can work out how they function.

I'm an Unraid virgin but so far the procedure seems painless (currently building the parity).  Be interested to know if anyone else has built one of these or similar?  Experiences?

£224 plus license for a 4 (or perhaps 5) bay Unraid box seems awesome though...

rorton

nice! Ive been looking for something to replace my ageing HP Microserver running unraid so i can get a better CPU - this looks promising.

The extra bay will be perfect for an SSD Cache drive

I built mine from scratch from a HPN40L server, slow CPU, but had done the job with unraid for 7 or 8 years now

jfinnie

It's probably not much of an upgrade from the CPU point of view so might not represent an upgrade, they're fairly similar:
PassMark - CPU Comparison AMD Turion II Neo N40L Dual- vs Intel Celeron J1800
It is a nice compact package though.
I see the price has gone up by £40 now.

I'm probably going to 3D print a bracket to securely hold an SSD in the 5th bay as I have a 240GB 2.5" drive lying around somewhere.  I'll upload details if I get round to it.

rorton

yeah, i was hoping it was a socketed CPU though, so upgradable maybe?

jfinnie

J1800 is flipchip BGA, so no socket, soldered down.

rorton

ah shame, thanks for that, i'll keep hunting then

Smurfin

Tempted to get the F5-221 on amazon today - £318 for 5 bays.

It seems the quad core has gone, but I'm wondering if dual-core will be sufficient for using sabnzb whilst streaming (blurays and UHD blurays).  Any thoughts?

jfinnie

No idea, seems like a generic question relating to this CPU though.  Maybe search for the CPU spec in relation to the app you want to run:
Intel Apollo J3355 2.0GHz dual-core CPU, and 2GB of RAM  

For what it is worth, uptime on my unit F4-220 unit is currently 70 days in Unraid.  I have had a single unexplained reboot in that time, but could have been power or some issue with Unraid, who knows. Happy with it for the money.

Smurfin

The 5th SATA port - can you fit a 3.5" HDD in there?  Wondering if the F4-221 has the same extra port...

jfinnie

"Can" is relative...  the port is populated (I've not tried it on mine, but I understand others have).  No idea if it is locked down if you use their own OS or not, but I'm using UNRAID so unlikely an issue there.  The space internally is empty, but I don't know for sure if the front panel interferes with a 3.5" drive.   I plan on 3D printing a bracket to use it for an internal cache drive for Unraid.
This guy hacked his front panel and bought an extra bay:
                                Edit: should add of course it is hard to know if it is physically fitted still on the different model.