Setup a TeraStation Pro 2 From Scratch

I recently got my hands on a TerraStation Pro 2 (TS-HTGL) and I ended up doing a lot of stuff I really didn’t need to do. Here is all the information I wish I had in one place. (All of this is at your own risk!)

If you are having an issue with this NAS here is my most likely list:

I’ve just put in blank disks, booted with the TFTP Boot Recovery but when I try to install the firmware I get the error ACP_State_Failure?

I was getting this error because I was trying to run a fresh install with only two disks installed. The box assumes 4 disks will be present when doing a clean installation. After poking around as root I found the raid setup script will attempt to wipe and setup all four disks at once. After editing the script for a while it got late, I came to my senses and just got 2 more disks before I accidentally did any damage. After the 4 disks were installed the firmware update worked until this next issue.

The Firmware update “couldn’t pass to the authentication.  Please confirm again admin-password “

My issue was I was not installing the Firmware updates in order. My firmware version was “—-” so I had no idea what version I had. I installed the 1.33-1.32 update which was successful then the 1.35-1.39 update from the Buffalo Website. After this I had access to the web front end.

What Raid level should I use?

It all depends on how fault tolerant the array needs to be.

Raid 0 will give you the maximum space as data will be striped over all disks but offers absolutely no redundancy all data will be lost.

Raid 1 will give you redundancy but this but does not offer any additional space. The drives are mirrored so in a setup with 2 disks one can be lost without issue, a system with 4 disks can lose 3 disks.

Raid 10 Probably the best in terms of size, speed and fault tolerance. Data is striped across two mirrored pairs of disks. Potentially 2 disks can be lost provided it is from the other pair in a 4 disk array.

Raid 5 will use all four disks spreading the parity information across all four. This offers the most space with the ability to lose a single disk. Storage companies have stopped recommending Raid 5 on small arrays due to the SATA unrecoverable read error rate. If a disk dies and during the rebuild process another disk dies, data will be lost as there is no redundant data during the rebuild process. SATA drives experience a read error every 12.5TB

Thoughts

I’ve been using the TeraStation for about a week now. I’m the only user so I don’t have to worry about sharing. I get a speed of about 12-14mb/s which is something I can live with when moving around VM drive images. I run a completely gigabit network but I think this will probably be a limitation of the drives. It does sound like it is trying to read from a floppy disk I’ve also tried playing videos directly from the drive. 1080p is fine and 4k Just about worked. It depends on the video and if anything else is happening on the drives. Defiantly not good enough for general 4k use at these speeds.

 

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