Leaderboard

Rossmann said they couldn't do anything with the drive, which REALLY surprised me, so they referred me to Gillware Data Recovery. I need to talk to them first before sending the drive in to make sure the attempt will be a reasonable sum, which I'll try to do tomorrow. I guess the moral of the story is not to futz around with diskpart unless you know for damn sure you know what you're doing. I received the Terramaster. It looks like a typical grey internal drive cage, just a little wider and without any mounting points. It uses screw-in drive sleds, unlike the Sabrent, which is a PITA, but c'est la vie. However, it also came with some paper-like inserts that go in-between the drives and the bottom of the sleds, which I've never seen. The boxed instructions don't say why they're required and the online product guide doesn't even mention them, so I can only guess their purpose (electrical insulators?). Bizarre. It also doesn't have an internal PSU as such, but came with a laptop-style 12V barrel plug brick power converter. Unlike the Sabrent, the drives sit vertically, which makes me a bit uncomfortable (I might lay it on its side). There is only one USB-C connector. There has been some talk on the Terramaster forums about people needing a powered USB hub with this unit. I don't know why this would be required when directly attached to the USB-C port on a motherboard, but maybe that's been my problem all along. If so, I'll consider slitting my wrists later. I'm in the process of long-formatting three 18 TB Seagate Exos simultaneously. If that passes, I'll continue trying to rebuild the pool. This is my last attempt at doing so. If the formats fail, I'm giving-up, at least for awhile. Maybe in the far-flung future I'll get a proper tower with a 10,000 watt PSU and stuff it with drives, but I really, REALLY hope the Terramaster comes through. I have confirmed that Windows recognizes all six drives, but the Sabrent did the same until I started encountering those drive dropouts, so longevity will determine the winner. More to come!