Tested Technology

While we wait for the major Unraid upgrade that will allow us to dispense with our pseudo Unraid array, we’ve been making a few cautious changes to the LincStation N1 installation we described in part 1. And although it remains without data redundancy, we’ve increasingly come to rely on it for media storage and deployment across the LAN. This isn’t as stupid as it might sound. One of our key “cautious changes” is the implementation… Now read on…

Tested Technology is approaching 2024 somewhat cautiously and frankly with little sign of optimism from a socio-political global perspective. But let’s look on the bright side. We’re back with Unraid! Regular readers may remember that in 2020 we published a series about our adventures with the Unraid NAS system, running on an out-of-warranty 8-bay QNAP server. The hardware held together just long enough for our 5-part series but in the early months of 2021 its… Now read on…

We concluded part 4 with all four of the F4-223 NAS’s drive bays populated and a very respectable total of around 22TB of securely redundant storage. “Redundant” means that any one of these drives can fail and we should be able to recover all our data. We also mentioned in passing that although the F4-223 is more than adequate for its primary function as a network storage device, its hardware limitations unfortunately won’t allow us to… Now read on…

It’s time for some drive expansion. We left the Terramaster F4-223 in part one with just two of the bays populated with a  pair of 1 TB drives. But we’re using the BTRFS file system and have chosen Terramaster’s TRAID asymmetric RAID configuration. If we’d chosen to use any of the conventional RAID configurations, to increase the size of our storage pool we would have had to fill the remaining two empty drives bays with… Now read on…