Photos and Features

Well at first glance the TD2 looks like a small two-drive bay NAS and Terra Master does make them. In fact between you and I, that’s what I thought it was at first. But the handle on top tells us otherwise. It’s an external drive encloser and a Thunderbolt 3 dock. The silver finish blends in with the center of the TD2 which is aluminum, as is the carrying handle up on top with plastic on the front and back. It has the Terra Master logo on the sides in black. Without drives inside it weighs just a hair over 3 pounds and its dimensions are 227 x 119 x 173 mm which is 8.9 inches long, 6.8 inches tall, and 4.6 inches wide.

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The front has two removable drive trays which are silver on the latch handles. Then on the left, there is a brushed aluminum panel which has the power button and a line of pinhole status LEDs. The top two are indicators for the two drive bays. Down on the bottom is a power indicator. Then the three that are labeled 20v, 15v, and 9v are all power indicators letting you know that the enclosure/hub is feeding power to your device and what voltage it is running at. The only voltage missing is 5V which is what you would see on phones.

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The other side of the TD2 also has the same Terra Master logo. This side also has a bright yellow sticker that talks about your setup. They talk about setting your raid using the tiny screwdriver and then using the pinhole tool to reset to have the raid take effect. This also comes with a warning that changing the raid also means losing data for anyone who doesn’t know.

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Now the back of the enclosure is where we finally get a better idea of what it is all about. There are two things going on back here basically. You have the rear I/O and a large fan enclosure that sticks out. The fan section feels like an afterthought, the whole enclosure could have been a little longer and it wouldn’t stick out like this but with the two hard drives, it is good to see that there is active cooling. For the rear I/O, this is all of the “dock” functionality. There are two Thunderbolt 3 connections, one has a picture of a laptop next to it to let you know which to plug your laptop into. Having two means you don’t lose any functionality or you can even daisy chain multiple TD2’s together. Just above that is a Mini DisplayPort connection. I really which this was just full-sized, not many people have DisplayPort cables in general but especially not the Mini-sized connection. Then down at the bottom is the DC plug for the included power supply. It is DC 12V input and the power supply is rated at 90 watts which is more than my laptop charger supports which is good, it can pass through all the power my laptop will need and still have the power to run the two hard drives and the dock functionality. There is a 1GbE network port which is huge when it comes to ultrabook style laptops that never have a wired connection. I know I keep a portable one in my laptop bag for that exact reason. Then up top for plugs, there are two USB 3.0 plugs. The RAID switch that I mentioned before is here as well, you can turn it four directions to set the RAID functionality of the hard drives. RAID 1 and RAID 0 give you the option between having striped data across the two drives for faster performance or redundant storage in case one of the drives die. Then for Single this just runs your drives independently, when you hook up you will see two drives. JBOD is similar, there aren’t any speed or redundancy benefits but it combines the drives when it comes to your computer, two drives will show up as one. Then the tiny pinhole reset button is just below the RAID knob.

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Up under the TD2, they do have ventilation covering the entire bottom for airflow. Then there are four feet that are an inch long to keep the enclosure from sliding around. There is also a sticker here with the model information and a model number. Terra Master’s contact information is here as well as some of the normally required certification logos. The serial number is also here on a second sticker.

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The two drive trays are made of grey plastic and have a silver latch that you pull up on to free them up to pull them out of the TD2. The end of the tray has some small vent holes to help some air pull through and across the hard drives. Then for drive mounting, all of the mounting holes are on the bottom, no edge mounting here. There are holes for both 2.5 inch and 3.5-inch drives and SSDs and on the bottom, they have lines that show where the 2.5-inch drives should mount to make sure they line up with the SATA backplane.

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Speaking of the SATA backplane here is a look inside through the drive tray slows. You can see the PCB at the end with the SATA data and power connections as well as the fan at the back. They even cut a hole in the PCB to help with the airflow there as well.

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So I pulled the TD2 apart to see what was going on inside. To do this you have to remove the four screws at the back of the enclosure that are above and below the rear fan. From there you can pull the back cover off and unplug the fan and then the entire inside frame will side out of the front.

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The motherboard has a foam section on its back to keep from grounding out and it is held in place with four screws. On the top, we can see the single PCIe x4 slot which is used to hook into the SATA backplane. Then there is a ribbon cable for the front status LEDs and power button. Power circuitry takes up the bottom section of the board. The rear I/O is mostly soldered in but the two Thunderbolt connections hook up using an M.2 type connection and an add-on board which has a metal shield over it.

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Here is a look at the two drive trays with our test SSDs in them. You can see that the 2.5-inch mounting holes only line up with three holes which is the same as what I’ve seen in other NAS.

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