By The D8 Hybrid, an extremely versatile external storage enclosure with four full-sized 3.5/2.5-inch SATA bays and four 2280 M.2 ports to handle NVMe SSDs (30TB HDDs/8TB SSDs), can accommodate up to 162 TB of storage. Additionally, it performs well within the 10Gbps USB limit.
Features
You can also utilize 2.5-inch SATA SSDs or 2.5-inch HDDs in the 3.5-inch drive bays, which I have already listed for you above. 2.5-inch HDDs fall well short of their larger cousins in terms of speed and capacity, although SATA SSDs will perform better whether used alone or in RAID 0. The D8 Hybrid is a mostly black plastic box with a metal frame that is 8.75 inches deep, 6.75 inches tall, and 7 inches broad (approximate measurements). Although they do not lock, the four 3.5-inch drive trays are simple to open. The detachable side panel that conceals the four M.2 NVMe slots is fastened to the enclosure with two screws on the rear.
The accompanying illustration illustrates a small problem with the M.2 slots: I managed to screw down an NVMe SSD that was not fully put into the M.2 socket, but it did not show up when the box turned on. When installing SSDs, make sure no metal edge contacts are visible. RAID is supported by the D8 Hybrid, but it only works with the first two 3.5-inch disk bays. The six additional bays and slots’ drives show up as single LUNs (logical units) or drives. Think of the D8 as a two-drive RAID box that has four M.2 slots and two additional bays. We are not criticizing the arrangement in any way. It can be quite useful under the correct conditions, which include having a lot of unused SATA and NVMe storage lying around.
TERRAMASTER D8 Hybrid HDD NVMe Enclosure USB 3.2 Gen 2 10Gbps Type C 8Bay USB Storage Supports RAID 0/1/Single/JBOD Exclusive
The RAID choose rotary switch (single, JBOD/concatenated, striped RAID 0, and mirrored RAID 1), a RAID reset pinhole button, a sizable fan opening, a power jack, and an on/off button are all located on the rear of the D8 Hyrbid. As previously mentioned, the transmission interface is USB 3.2 10Gbps, and TerraMaster comes with a premium Type-C to Type-C connection. The 7.5 amp/12 volt AC adaptor has a wall cord that may be removed.
What is the TerraMaster D8 Hybrid’s price?
At the time of writing, the D8 Hybrid cost $300, which is slightly less than $40 per bay. That is undoubtedly cheaper than the cost of six more enclosures plus a 10Gbps dual 3.5-inch RAID enclosure. Consolidating all those drives into a single box and connecting them to a single connection has advantages. Particularly considering that today’s small and light laptops frequently have sparse port allocation! To put it another way, the D8 Hybrid is a terrific value if it meets your demands.
What is the D8 Hybrid’s speed?
The type of storage you add will have a significant impact on the speed that the D8 Hybrid offers. However, because of the 10Gbps bus, it will reach its maximum speed of about 1GBps. The fact that TerraMaster chose not to use USB 3.2×2 or USB 4 surprised me a little. Other NVMe-enabled products have recently made similar decisions, which has disappointed me. The bad news is that USB 4 chips are still hard to come by. To clarify the pertinent dilemma, NVMe can achieve 3GBps or more when connected over Thunderbolt 3/4 or USB 4, and 2GBps when connected by USB 3.2×2 at 20Gbps.
Aside from bus selection, the D8 Hybrid achieved a speed of up to 10Gbps, which is incredibly fast in real life. I observed 290MBps from a single 3.5-inch, 24GB WD DC HC580 hard drive, 580MBps from two of the latter in RAID 0, 570MBps from SATA SSDs in the 3.5-inch bays, and a little over 1GBps from SSDs in the NVMe slots. That is excellent for USB 10Gbps in every way. This time, the drive being reviewed is highlighted in gray rather than red. The Seagate Game Drive SSD, another 10Gbps product that works well with the D8 Hybrid’s NVMe slots, is highlighted in red to draw attention to the 10Gbps cap. Why? The other colors of red that I thought of did not appeal to me. I am being sued.
With NVMe, the D8 Hybrid truly outperformed the Seagate Game SSD drive. However, the SSD in the Seagate might not be as fast as the Sabrent Rocket 4 I used. In any case, you are aware that the versatility of the D8 Hybrid does not come at the expense of performance. At any rate, considering the 10Gbps limit. I have no issues with the D8 Hybrid’s performance, except for wishing it had 20Gbps or 40Gbps technology. Additionally, 1GBps transfers allow you to accomplish a lot.
You can use Windows (or macOS) software RAID to create more sophisticated arrays or make use of more of the D8 Hybrid’s eight disks in that way, even if the D8 Hybrid only enables RAID for the first two bays. No matter how you combine the SSDs, the 10Gbps USB bus would limit performance to 1GBps, thus I would only use it for redundancy (mirroring, RAID 5).
Conclusion
The TerraMaster D8 Hybrid is a flexible solution to put all of your hard drives in one physical box if you want to run two hard drives in RAID 0, along with a few additional HDDs or SATA SSDs and some external NVMe SSDs. Although it is limited for NVMe, performance is unquestionably adequate for the majority of tasks. In other words, the D8 Hybrid is a fantastic device – a perfect way to use random drives you may have lying around — if affordability, capacity, versatility, and HDD/SSD SATA support are important considerations. However, if you want your NVMe SSDs to operate at the highest level, seek one that uses a faster bus.
