Rear of the Terramaster F8

Update See this followup: Terra-Master F8 SSD - Fixing Fedora Boot Issues

 

I've been looking for a portable, fast, mid-capacity storage solution for photos and video. The Terra-Master F8, the base model, seems like a good solution.

https://www.terra-master.com/us/f8-ssd.html

My plan is to use four 2TB M.2 NVMe drives for the main zpool in RAIDz1, two 1TB NVMe drives with a 32GB M.2 Optane cache in hardware as a L2ARC as stripped, and two 16GB Optane drives as a ZIL as mirrored. 

The amazon reviews suggest that a 48GB RAM SODIMM will work so I'm going to try that too. At worst a 32GB stick will work.

One other neat point is the 12v barrel power input. This means a 12v regulated, perhaps even unregulated, from a power brick via PTAP connectors will work. Since I use 12v PTAP for all of my mobile a/v gear, that'd be perfect.

This will make a great iSCSI target for my mobile editing systems, will work great on my 10/40 GbE home network when I arrive back at the house, and maybe WiFi based file serving for live photo/video storage. I'll have to look into USB Storage Target support for Linux too with this. Maybe hook a BlackMagic Pocket Cin 6k Pro directly to it via USB-C.

Edit: I am thinking I might use this or something directly in one of my main file servers to use as an iSCSI target for my main Lightroom catalog and preview storage. This seems like it might be faster since I can store more previews and keep the Lightroom SQLite3 in RAM via Window's iSCSI subsystem's much, much better memory caching (vs local NVMe).