TerraMaster D4-320 Is $170.99 at Amazon for an Empty 4-Bay Box With No RAID

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TerraMaster D4-320 Is $170.99 at Amazon for an Empty 4-Bay Box With No RAID

The TerraMaster D4-320 is $170.99 at Amazon, down from a $189.99 list price, and that money buys an empty metal box. The four-bay enclosure ships diskless, so the 120TB attached to its name is a ceiling rather than a capacity.

Hand inserting a black drive tray into the TerraMaster D4-320 enclosure
A hand sliding an empty tray into the four-bay chassis. The trays need no tools and lock on insertion. Image: TerraMaster

TerraMaster sells the same unit for exactly $170.99 on its own store, against the same $189.99 regular price. The 10% saving is the maker's own promotion, running in both places at once.

What arrives in the carton is a chassis, four tool-free trays, a 120 mm fan and a 72W power adapter. Storage is extra, and at current drive prices it is the overwhelming part of the bill.

What $170.99 actually buys

The Amazon listing is TerraMaster's own storefront rather than a marketplace reseller, and it shows In Stock with no quantity warning.

The D4-320 is direct-attached storage. It connects to one computer over a single USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C port rated at 10Gbps, and it has no network port.

TerraMaster says the bays take 3.5-inch SATA hard drives, 2.5-inch SATA hard drives and 2.5-inch SATA SSDs. Drives are hot swappable and the trays need no tools.

That 10Gbps link is shared across all four bays. The 1,016 MB/s figure TerraMaster quotes is a combined four-drive number measured with 8TB SATA drives, not a per-drive speed.

It is also a mains-powered desktop unit, not a portable one. Anyone after plug-in storage that already contains a disk is better served by something like the discounted Seagate 2TB portable drive.

Black four-bay TerraMaster enclosure standing on a desk next to an alarm clock
The assembled enclosure on a desk. TerraMaster rates it at 21.0 dB(A). Image: TerraMaster

TerraMaster D4-320 specifications

SpecificationTerraMaster D4-320
Drive bays4, hot swappable, tool-free trays
Drives includedNone
Drive support3.5-inch SATA HDD, 2.5-inch SATA HDD, 2.5-inch SATA SSD
Maximum raw capacity128TB (32TB x 4) per the spec table, 120TB (30TB x 4) per the Amazon listing
RAIDNone. Spec table reads SINGLE DISK
InterfaceUSB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C, 10Gbps
Quoted speed1,016 MB/s read and 960 MB/s write with four drives
CoolingOne 120 x 120 x 25 mm fan, smart mode
Noise21.0 dB(A)
PowerExternal 72W adapter, 12V DC, 40.8W in use and 3.7W hibernating
Operating systemsWindows, macOS, Linux, driverless
Size and weight222 x 179 x 154 mm, 1.9 kg
Warranty2 years

Filling the bays costs about 28 times the enclosure

Reaching 120TB means four 30TB drives. At the time of writing the only 30TB SATA drive on Amazon was a renewed Seagate Exos M at $1,200.00, so four come to $4,800.00.

That puts the advertised configuration at $4,970.99. The drives are roughly 28 times the price of the box that holds them.

New drives cost more. A new Seagate 32TB IronWolf Pro is $1,399.99, and four of those reach $5,599.96.

Smaller capacities bring the total down without approaching the headline number. Four new 20TB WD Red Pro drives, shipped by Amazon at $897.33 each, come to $3,589.32 for 80TB.

Mechanical storage has avoided the worst of the squeeze that pushed NVMe prices well above their previous lows. High-capacity enterprise drives remain the expensive half of any build like this.

No RAID, and three different capacity ceilings

The specification table on TerraMaster's product page lists RAIDs Supported as SINGLE DISK.

Four installed drives therefore show up as four separate volumes. There is no redundancy and no pooled volume unless third-party software is added, which TerraMaster states in two places.

The capacity ceiling is less consistent. The Amazon listing says a single HDD up to 30TB for 120TB total, while the spec page says individual drives up to 32TB for 128TB.

The same spec page elsewhere cites a maximum individual hard drive capacity of 22TB. It also notes that compatibility with larger capacity hard drives is yet to be verified.

TerraMaster's own launch announcement, dated March 2024, put the ceiling at 96TB using 24TB drives. Three published figures for one enclosure is a lot of room for interpretation.

How it compares with four-bay NAS boxes

Every unit below is also sold diskless, so the comparison is enclosure against enclosure.

ProductPriceBaysRAIDNetwork
TerraMaster D4-320$170.994NoneNone, USB only
UGREEN NAS DH4300 Plus$399.994Yes, RAID 0 basis quoted2.5GbE
UGREEN DXP4800 Plus$656.994Multiple RAID options10GbE

The gap to the DH4300 Plus is $229.00, and that buys RAID, network access and an operating system. The D4-320 wins only when none of those are wanted.

For a sense of the other end of the market, the fanless Minisforum S5 NAS takes a different approach to the same problem.

Neither Amazon nor TerraMaster publishes an end date for the $170.99 price, and neither states how long the 10% promotion runs. TerraMaster's hard drive compatibility list for the D4-320 was not reachable at the time of writing, so the largest drive it has actually validated is not confirmed.

Prices at both sellers are those listed at the time of writing and can change without notice.

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