TerraMaster F2-212 is a 2-Bay NAS powered by Realtek RTD1619B Arm Cortex-A55 SoC

TerraMaster F2-212

TerraMaster F2-212 is a 2-bay NAS powered by Realtek RTL1619B quad-core Cortex-A55 processor with support for support TRAID flexible disk array management tool, BTRFS file system, Snapshot, and TFSS disaster recovery tool. If you’ve never heard about TRAID (TerraMaster RAID) and TFSS (TerraMaster File System Snapshot) that may be because those are developed internally by TerraMaster as respectively a RAID solution with an automatic combination of disk space, hard disk failure redundancy protection, and automatic capacity expansion, and a BTRFS snapshot tool with support for COW (copy-on-write), filesystem level snapshots, custom snapshot schedules, and more. TerraMaster F2-212 specifications: SoC – Realtek RTD1619B quad-core Cortex-A55 processor @ up to 1.7 GHz System Memory – 1GB RAM Storage 2x SATA bays for 3.5-inch SATA HDD and/or 2.5-inch SATA SSD/HDD for up to 2x 22TB drives; hot swapping support File systems Internal Drive – BTRFS, EXT4 External Drive – EXT3, EXT4, NTFS, FAT32, […]

GMK NucBox2 Review – Windows 10, Unraid OS on a Coffee Lake mini PC

GMK NucBox2 Review

Karl here. Today we are going to look at a mini PC. It is by GMK. GMK’s first foray looks to be the NucBox, a super tiny mini pc. I would call the NucBox2 its older, bigger, more capable brother. What stood out to me was the M.2 4x NVMe slot. I don’t anticipate a superfast SSD to come with the NucBox2 but we will see. The NucBox2 only had one 8 GB stick of memory and I had an extra stick laying around so I installed it to get dual-channel support. I think they are doing this mini PC a disservice using memory in single-channel mode. A quick Google search shows an 8GB stick is about $50 and I would highly recommend this upgrade. Notable Specs Processor – Intel Core i5-8259U 4-core/8-thread Coffee Lake processor 802.11 AC WiFI M.2 NVMe 256 GB SSD (Netac) 8GB memory single-channel Gig Ethernet […]

Nvidia Shield Android TV vs Apple TV vs Roku 3 vs Fire TV vs Nexus Player – Video Capabilities and Features Comparison

Since Nvidia released the Shield Android TV box, I’ve heard several people saying Nvidia raised the bar and even disrupted the TV box market by bringing a powerful HTPC and gaming console to the market for just $199. The company has now released OTA 2.0 firmware that improves HTPC capabilities, including under Kodi and Plex, and the box supports for 10-bit HEVC, H.264, and VP9 @ 4K, and audio pass-through for HD audio codecs such as Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master. As part of the release announcement, Nvidia also compared the Shield TV media capabilities to the ones of other US centric media players, namely Apple TV (2015), Roku 3, Amazon Fire TV (2015), and Nexus Player. Since it comes from Nvidia, it was also going to show the Shield TV in a good light, but I’m very surprised to see that Apple, Amazon, Google, and Roku would ship a […]

QNAP TS-x51 NAS Supports Up to 16 Drives, On-the fly HD Video Transcoding, HDMI Output, Virtualization and More

QNAP has introduced their latest TS-x51 NAS family at Computex 2014 with four NAS supporting between 2 to 8 drives, expandable to a total of 16 drives via expansion enclosures. The storage devices powered by an Intel Celeron J1800 dual core processor boast video transcoding capability that’s 18 times faster than earlier Atom based solutions, feature an HDMI port, and support virtualization to allow you to run two operating systems such as Linux and Windows 8. QNAP TS-x51 specifications: SoC – Intel Celeron J1800 dual core processor @ 2.41 GHz (burst frequency: 2.58) with Intel HD graphics System Memory – 1GB SO-DIMM DDR3L-1333 or 4GB SO-DIMM DDR3L-1333 (Each model listed above has 1GB or 4GB RAM options), expandable to 8GB RAM via a second RAM slot Storage 512 MB flash (DOM – Disk On Module) Hot swappable 2.5″ or 3.5″ SATA drives @ 6Gb/s, 3Gb/s. Expansion enclosures – UX-800P, or UX-500P RAID […]

Cloud Media 1OTT Internet Media Player Runs Linux on Cavium ARM11 SoC

Cloud Media is mostly known for their Linux based Pop Corn Hour media players. but recently they started offered a free media player called FreeOTT via ISPs or Facebook giveaways. This little box gives direct access to online video channels. I reviewed FreeOTT a few months ago, and found the interface to be sluggish (possibly because of my Internet connection), audio was not working on my TV. So overall not a very good experience from my side, but they’ve upgraded the firmware with features like Miracast, DLNA, and “iOSCast” (Airplay?), possible improving performance, and recently added CCTV 1 to 15, except CCTV 4, to the list of channels. FreeOTT was difficult to source since you can only get it for free, so the company has just launched 1OTT player based on what appears to be the same hardware platform, but with a larger enclosure. 1OTT Specifications: Media Processor – Cavium CELESTIAL […]

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