Unraid on Terramaster bargain NAS F4-220 chassis

jfinnie

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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... :)
 
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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
 
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
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.
 
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?
 
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?
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.
 
The 5th SATA port - can you fit a 3.5" HDD in there? Wondering if the F4-221 has the same extra port...
 
"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.
 
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Hi
so i got next version to your , the f5-221 , its comes with j3355 CPU ,
i follow the procedure and successfully able to use Unraid on it ,
as u said not an upgrade to CPU but much much better in term of usage ,

so as you said controller was ramping , i have different issue , my fans are at lowest speed ,
and they don't even speedup even drives temp reaching 55 .
i have installed the fan controller and system temp plugins but can you guide a little bit how you
were able to set things up as there is no fan controller detected .


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 ..
 
Hi
so i got next version to your , the f5-221 , its comes with j3355 CPU ,
i follow the procedure and successfully able to use Unraid on it ,
as u said not an upgrade to CPU but much much better in term of usage ,

so as you said controller was ramping , i have different issue , my fans are at lowest speed ,
and they don't even speedup even drives temp reaching 55 .
i have installed the fan controller and system temp plugins but can you guide a little bit how you
were able to set things up as there is no fan controller detected .
No idea if it is the same issue, but the important point to make the sensors and fan control work was that I logged in over ssh and ran the sensors-detect command to make it work. That detected the fan controller I believe and allowed it to be controlled.

My notes to myself (made sense to me at the time, not sure how useful they will be to you) were:

run sensors-detect to find it87 device

Case fans are on Fan3 input
hwmon1/fan3_input current speed: 2136 RPM
It appears that fan hwmon1/fan3_input
is controlled by pwm hwmon1/pwm3

Manual fan control:
echo 1 > /sys/class/hwmon/hwmon1/pwm3_enable
Full speed:
echo 255 > /sys/class/hwmon/hwmon1/pwm3

You might need to install perl for sensors-detect to work if I recall correct.
 
These are the settings I used for my fan control after doing sensors-detect. Unfortunately I'm not sure there is any guarantee the board in your unit will be the same. Perhaps post here if you get it working.

Screenshot 2020-01-08 at 18.49.59.png
 
Hi
so i got next version to your , the f5-221 , its comes with j3355 CPU ,
i follow the procedure and successfully able to use Unraid on it ,
as u said not an upgrade to CPU but much much better in term of usage ,

so as you said controller was ramping , i have different issue , my fans are at lowest speed ,
and they don't even speedup even drives temp reaching 55 .
i have installed the fan controller and system temp plugins but can you guide a little bit how you
were able to set things up as there is no fan controller detected .

Ok....this is a simple fix. Go into the BIOS on the Terramaster, and change fan profile from Automatic to Max Speed. It fixes it, and you should have drive temps around 30 degrees under load (the fans are still very quiet). For some reason, the default bios setting doesn't work - the fans simply don't spin.
 
Ok....this is a simple fix. Go into the BIOS on the Terramaster, and change fan profile from Automatic to Max Speed. It fixes it, and you should have drive temps around 30 degrees under load (the fans are still very quiet). For some reason, the default bios setting doesn't work - the fans simply don't spin.
I guess you've got the VGA cable then...? :)
 
I guess you've got the VGA cable then...? :)

F5-221 has an HDMI port. It is a newer build than the F4-220 i think you have @jfinnie.

I am running Unraid on one of these as well and my fan auto control settings are like in the screenshot. Since @karanchoo has the newer box, my settings should probably match his settings.

Click Detect, let it do it's thing and then select it8620 - pwm3.

Screen Shot 2020-01-09 at 15.41.06 .png
 
Nice one. I must say, I really quite like these little Terramaster units.
Edit: can you set the F5-221 units to boot off a different USB stick without having to crack open the box? Not that it is much effort, but would be nice not to have to bother.
 
Nice one. I must say, I really quite like these little Terramaster units.
Edit: can you set the F5-221 units to boot off a different USB stick without having to crack open the box? Not that it is much effort, but would be nice not to have to bother.

I cracked mine open to add a stick of 4gb ram, replacing the usb was a drive-by effort :) Didn't bother checking the bios for boot options. I didn’t even bother booting the terramaster os either. I'll take a look next time I reboot and report back though.

I'd love to get the HDD leds to work in Unraid though. 5 red lights instinctively give me the creeps when I glance at the box.. heh...
 
I cracked mine open to add a stick of 4gb ram, replacing the usb was a drive-by effort :) Didn't bother checking the bios for boot aptions. I didn’t even bother booting the terramaster os either. I'll take a look next time I reboot and report back though.

I'd love to get the HDD leds to work in Unraid though. 5 red lights instinctively give me the creeps when I glance at the box.. heh...
Someone did post a driver for them in another thread (at least on some variant of the box). I'll have to have a look at it at some point. Not sure if Unraid supports / allows custom drivers and / or kernels - do you know?
Link here: TerraMaster F2-220
 
The driver would have to be compiled for Slackware. If it can't be added manually, worse case we could ask the team at Limetech to add the driver in the next build. Don't really have the time to go down that rabbit hole at the moment though :(
 
F5-221 has an HDMI port. It is a newer build than the F4-220 i think you have @jfinnie.

I am running Unraid on one of these as well and my fan auto control settings are like in the screenshot. Since @karanchoo has the newer box, my settings should probably match his settings.

Click Detect, let it do it's thing and then select it8620 - pwm3.

View attachment 1242579

That's strange - mine doesn't detect any PWM controller.....
 
That's strange - mine doesn't detect any PWM controller.....
For what it is worth I didn't get any joy with the sensors until I ssh'd into the box and ran sensors-detect from the command line. I'm pretty sure sensors-detect needed perl (which became obvious once I tried to run it from the command line) and that wasn't installed by default. I have a feeling it might work from the GUI if you install perl, but I'm a bit old-school and tend to do stuff on the command line if there is a way (used to be a Linux kernel SW eng at one point in my mis-spent youth).
 
"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.


I currently have two TerraMaster 5 bay NAS units "F5-422-10Gb" n "F5-221" and I'm wanting to install FreeNAS on both and Upgrade the RAM, wanting to use Unraid as a PLEX media server.
Both units also have the HDMI socket, so, I should be able to edit the issues with the cooling fans easily.

I'd like to know if you had to use any particular type of RAM modules when you upgraded the Ram in the TerraMaster unit, or could we install any Laptop Ram modules?... I'm thinking of installing 2x4GB modules on both units.

I ask because, on the TerraMaster forums, they claim only certain types of modules work, though I presume this is to scare you into buying the expensive modules from TerraMaster.

Thanks for the video!
 
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