At this point I would be looking at data recovery options to get your photos back. Shop around, prices vary wildly. I had a customer that was quoted from $800 to simply look at the drive (recovery of data or not) to close to $3K to recover 30GB of data, but in the end he found and used a service that did that same job for less than $400 (even if it did take almost 2 months to get his drive and data back).
A RAID array will be more expensive than the single drive that my customer needed to recover.
I searched a little more at how Terramaster works. Seems like it installs a software raid program on your computer. This is certainly not a NAS.
It seems like R-Studio is a possible option for recovering your data. But unless you know what you're doing with low level disk operations, it could just as easily destroy any further chances of recovering that data too. Thread carefully.
I would recommend QNAP going forward while Synology is also a consideration.
I am more wary than ever about using the Terramaster products. Even / especially in JBOD mode.
Copy whatever data you can from the working one and be prepared to spend some money to do this correctly.
Remember that a NAS with RAID5 or RAID6 or RAID10 is not a backup. Leave room in your budget to have a USB / eSATA (depending on the capabilities of the NAS you buy) external drive to do backups to frequently.
I hope someone can offer better suggestions, but the implementations of a NAS (whether RAID or not) that the Terramaster units offers are inferior to Windows built in RAID options.
I haven't seen or heard of them before this, but I too 'dare not trust them' for important data from the quick search I just completed about them.
Agreed. For a number of reasons, mostly portability and commonality, if using an external enclosure, I would look at an eSATA enclosure and using Windows software RAID for it, if you felt you needed/wanted RAID and also wanted/needed an external enclosure. I supposed you could do the same through some of the USB enclosures out there too.
I would generally not rely on an enclosure's controller to provide RAID functionality. I am wary of hardware RAID, to many possible secret sauces out there where if you pull the drives and put them in something different, all your data is gone (of course with the exception of RAID1).
I am willing to trust the RAID in something like Synology, QNAP, or Intel, ONLY to the extent that the hardware is common enough and their RAID support is generally pretty multi-generational, that so long as I know the drive order, pulling them from one and dropping them in to another should not present any problems. Should (and yes, I have my SATA ports labeled on each drive. Example, in my server my 2TB drives in RAID0 were on ports 1 and 2 (port 0 has the SSD), so there is some painters tape on each drive telling me which port they are plugged in to, so if I ever had to pull the drives and stick them in something else, I know which order to plug them in.
Also, backups, backups, backups. In some ways they are almost tripley crucual with RAID. You have a higher chance of a drive dying (because more drives) and the chances of things being screwed up rebuilding an array are non-zero, and the chances that if it is an enclosure/controller failure that dropping the array in to a different machine/enclosure has a failure rate greater than zero...backups are CRITICAL with RAID. The odds that some "failure mode" protection might save your butt with RAID1, 5, 10 or 6 might save your butt are semi-decent (but it won't save you from volume corruption, virus, accidental deletion, etc.)...but the odds that a disk will die are much greater.
Catch 22 and the only solution for any data is duplication at every step of the process. I never delete pictures off a memory card until they are on both my desktop/laptop/tablet AND my server at a minimum (an external USB HDD also gets loaded with backup's periodically...about once a month). That is generally my most priceless stuff. When I can, I also copy the memory cards to whatever I have with me (often my tablet, sometimes my laptop). Sometimes every day, sometimes it does go a bit more than a day between backups of the memory cards.
It can be a bit of a pain, but it only takes once to bite you in the butt. I have, so far in my life, only had one memory card die. Just about everything was recoverable when I used image recovery software (took a good 8hrs to get it all off...from a 16GB card, that I had maybe used 3GB of). I also try, when I can't backup memory cards, to swap memory cards every day, until I can backup the memory card. So, again, if one dies, I am probably only losing a day's worth of stuff (why I carry a couple of 16GB and a couple of 8GB memory cards. I think I have ONCE in my entire life used up an 8GB card in a day shooting my brother-in-law's wedding recently, but it allows me to swap a memory card per day for a few days if I am too lazy/haven't had a chance to backup and reduces risk that if a card dies, it takes everything with it).