How Creators Can Unlock Storage Freedom When Storage Manufacturers "Lock" Hard Drives
The current hard drive market offers a wide range of brands, allowing consumers to freely build personalized storage solutions based on key parameters such as read/write speed, capacity density, and failure rates. However, recently, some brands' new NAS devices have begun limiting third-party hard drive functionalities. In addition to disabling health status prediction features, they also block advanced functions like Volume-wide Deduplication, Lifespan Analysis, and automatic firmware updates.
This news has certainly sent ripples through the content creation community—especially as the daily generation of 4K/8K ultra-high-definition footage exceeds 500GB, and the film industry’s need for elastic storage scalability grows. Manufacturers' "hardware certification walls" force creators into a dilemma: either pay the high premium for certified hard drives, or accept the data risks that come with feature restrictions.
When storage devices start to "select" hard drives, what challenges do content creators face in their creative freedom?
1. Locked Performance Ceiling
Native 4K uncompressed streaming transmission requires breaking through the 300MB/s benchmark, and live sports events at 120fps can cause data surges of up to 1.5GB/s. Third-party hard drives restricted by manufacturers may suffer from firmware incompatibility, affecting transmission stability and resulting in reduced actual throughput.
2. Out-of-Control Collaboration Chain
Team assets are forced to be split between NAS certified disks and non-certified expansion disks, leading to a higher rate of version conflicts and a significant drop in real-time editing performance, thus reducing team creation efficiency. Film projects often employ multi-disk distributed storage systems (such as RAID 5 + hot spare disks), and non-certified hard drives could cause cross-disk redundancy mechanisms to fail.
3. High-Risk Data Silos
Certified hard drives are expensive, and small-to-medium teams are more inclined to mix different types of hard drives. However, they now face the risk of increased failure rates due to a lack of unified health monitoring (such as SMART analysis or bad sector warnings). When storage pools created with non-certified drives face issues like pool crashes or unrecognized disks, official customer service may refuse to help with troubleshooting, requiring users to bear the cost of data recovery themselves.
When some storage manufacturers "lock" hard drives, TerraMaster firmly believes that storage should not become a bottleneck in creation. We aim to return storage to its essential role as a tool. TerraMaster' s new D9-320 model, with a 9-bay compatible architecture, helps creators unlock storage freedom:
1.Hard Drive Compatibility
The D9-320 supports 3.5-inch SATA hard drives, 2.5-inch SATA hard drives, and 2.5-inch SATA SSDs, and is compatible with brands like Western Digital, Seagate, and Toshiba (for optimal performance, it’s recommended to check TerraMaster's hard drive compatibility list).
2. System Compatibility
It is fully compatible with seven major operating systems (Windows 10/11, Mac OS, major Linux distributions, Kylin V10 SP1, UOS, Unraid, TrueNAS, Proxmox). The product adheres strictly to USB protocol standards, seamlessly connecting with computers, TVs, servers, set-top boxes, and other devices, offering users unprecedented convenience and flexibility.
3. Device Interface Compatibility
The USB-C interface is compatible with USB 3.0/3.1/3.2, USB4, Thunderbolt 3, and Thunderbolt 4 ports, providing stable and efficient data transmission. The 10Gbps USB-A Host interface supports multiple storage devices linked via daisy-chaining technology, enabling flexible capacity expansion and addressing the issue of insufficient USB ports on computers.
4. NAS Storage Expansion
The D9-320 deeply integrates with the TOS system, offering one-click expansion for TerraMaster NAS storage pools. It supports JBOD/RAID, TRAID, and TRAID+ array modes, making it easy to expand NAS storage capacity.
With its powerful compatibility, innovative "Independent Hard Drive Power Control System," massive 198TB storage capacity, and 10Gbps high-speed transmission, the D9-320 has become an "invisible collaborator" for editors and special effects teams. As the wave of industrialization in film grows, storage devices have evolved from being a "logistical role" to a "creation accelerator"—this is the deep value that the D9-320 brings to the content creation industry.