Summary
Highlights
The video introduces Terramaster as a competitor in the NAS market, highlighting its well-built, performant products with user-friendly interfaces. It announces a review of the F4-425 Plus, featuring a largely revised hardware and the new TOS 6.0.7 operating system, 4 years after the last review of version 4.2.
The unboxing reveals the F4-425 Plus, an external power supply, two 1.5m network cables, quick start guides, screws for 2.5-inch SSDs/disks, and adhesive labels. The NAS is compact for a 4-bay device, measuring 15cm high, 18.1cm wide, and 21.9cm deep, weighing 2.9kg. It features an aluminum chassis, plastic front, and bays with Terramaster branding. The front includes a power button, a USB-A 3.2 port (5 Gbps), and five LEDs indicating disk activity and system status. The bays are easily accessible but lack locking mechanisms. The 3.5-inch disk bays are tool-free and have silent blocks. The rear includes an HDMI port, two USB-A 3.2 ports, one USB-C 3.2 port, two RJ45 5 Gbps ports with link aggregation support, a power connector, and a reset button, alongside a large 140mm fan with four speed modes.
The F4-425 Plus is equipped with an Intel N150 processor (7nm, early 2025 release), featuring four cores (no hyperthreading) clocked up to 3.6 GHz with a 6W TDP. It supports DDR5 RAM but uses PCIe Gen 3, which may limit SSD speeds, and has only one RAM slot, preventing dual-channel. The processor scores 5421 points on Passmark, outperforming some Ryzen and Celeron-equipped NAS. It includes an integrated Intel Graphics GPU supporting 4K hardware decoding. The NAS comes with 16GB of non-ECC DDR5 RAM. While Terramaster claims expandability to 32GB, Intel Arc specifications for the N150 cap RAM at 16GB, advising caution for users considering upgrades. Accessing RAM and the three SSD slots requires disassembling the chassis. The SSD slots lack integrated heatsinks and proper ventilation, potentially affecting performance under heavy use.
Terramaster provides no power consumption figures. In read/write usage with four 4TB drives, the NAS consumed up to 53W, which is high given the 6W CPU. Adding two SSDs for cache showed no change in consumption. At idle, it consumed 38W. Hibernation was unsuccessful during testing, attributed to active background processes, but the reviewer recommends against using disk hibernation for longevity. The NAS supports up to four 30TB hard drives, totaling 120TB in RAID 0/JBOD, 90TB in RAID 5/TREID, or 60TB in RAID 10/TED plus. It can also integrate up to three SSDs for an additional 24TB, boosting total storage to 144TB, though SSDs cannot be part of the same volume as HDDs. RAID reconstruction times can be lengthy, with a 4x4TB RAID 5 array taking over 10 hours. The NAS supports direct NTFS disk connection without formatting for data access.
Installation is streamlined using a PC assistant or mobile app to create the first volume. A minor criticism is the mandatory email registration during setup. The NAS supports BTRFS partitions with user quotas. Setup time is under 5 minutes. Initial RAID 5 synchronization for a 4x4TB array took about 10 hours, during which the NAS remains usable with reduced performance. Terramaster allows flexible choice of disks and SSDs from any brand. USB peripheral support is limited to storage devices; printers, mice, and keyboards were not recognized.
The testing protocol involved a powerful AMD 5950X PC, transferring data via SMB to a RAM disk for consistent performance. Four file cohorts (64KB, 1MB, 50MB, 1GB+) were tested in read and write modes, five times each, with write cache active until saturation. Tests were conducted in both unencrypted and encrypted folders. The NAS was connected directly via a single 5Gbps port. In an unencrypted folder, write speeds were 14 MB/s (64KB), 154 MB/s (1MB), 364 MB/s (50MB), and 436 MB/s (1GB+). Read speeds were 15, 224, 335, and 467 MB/s, respectively. These speeds were considered decent but below expectations for a 5Gbps connection and a theoretical 10Gbps aggregate. Encrypted folder tests showed reduced speeds: writes at 3, 57, 169, and 214 MB/s, and reads at 8, 113, 316, and 369 MB/s. Internal file copy performance was excellent, averaging 350 MB/s for large files, significantly outperforming competitors. SSD cache had little to no positive impact on these benchmarks, sometimes even reducing speeds.
The NAS effortlessly handles multiple 4K video streams for client-side decoding. The native video player in TOS 6 supports 4K playback (without audio for Dolby/DTS formats). Jellyfin, available as a native package, provides smooth 4K UHD playback with full audio support (Dolby, DTS, Atmos). The OS includes DLNA server compatibility. Terramaster's app store offers various essential applications, including backup solutions for Windows, Mac, Linux, other NAS, and cloud services (both to and from the NAS). It also features a photo app with facial recognition, web hosting tools (PHPBB, WordPress, Joomla), autonomous download managers, and a surveillance center for network cameras. Docker support allows for extending functionalities with VMs. TOS 6, based on Linux, enables sideloading community packages and offers advanced features like BTRFS, automatic deduplication, quotas, VPN support, folder encryption, WORM folders, and simplified remote access via Terramaster links, though direct access via user's own tutorials is recommended for better performance. A convenient feature is a list of all packages and their corresponding ports within the interface.
The HDMI port has limited utility, as no official packages support it; it's mainly for advanced users wishing to boot a secondary OS. The resource monitor's graphs are hard to read due to frequent refreshes and lack detailed per-disk performance data, hindering troubleshooting. The inability to open multiple instances of the same window (e.g., file manager) is also a minor inconvenience for data organization tasks. Despite these small flaws, the system is highly regarded.
Priced at €615 with a 2-year warranty, the Terramaster F4-425 Plus offers competitive value, outperforming similar models from Synology (25 series) and Asustor (Nimbustor). While Green has cheaper alternatives with comparable hardware (DXP 4800 Plus), their OS is less mature than TOS 6. The F4-425 Plus is recommended for its balanced configuration, reliable performance, mature and stable OS, and ability to handle heavy workloads with multiple users and applications. It is also noted for being quiet, scalable, and efficient.