TerraMaster F8 SSD Plus review: A palm-sized powerful media class 8-bay NAS

This summer I have reviewed a couple of NAS devices from brands that aren't so well known that consist entirely out of SSD bays (1) (2), dumping the traditional spinning HDDs. I'm definitely a fan of SSD-based NAS, because it is far quieter and far more energy efficient —however, the initial cost can be quite eye watering. TerraMaster is a brand we've seen here before at Neowin, and they are getting in on the all-SSD act with their new F8 SSD Plus, which I have been using for the past couple of weeks.

I personally own a HDD-based NAS, but when I can afford to, I will move to an all SSD-based solution. I mostly use mine for Plex, and cloud backup of important files. Aside from a few other things as well as setting up some Docker containers, so long as there is a clear tutorial, that's about the extent of my expertise into the realm of network-attached storage devices goes; I'm still learning.

Here are the most important specifications:

As you can see from the specs, this is a seriously powerful NAS which is powered by the same Intel Core i3-N305 that is in the F4-424 Pro that we reviewed back in July. The Intel i3-N305 was introduced in Q1 of 2023 with support for AV1 decode, HDMI 2.1, WiFi 6E, Bluetooth 5.2, LPDDR5, DDR5 and DDR4, and a max TDP of 15W.

I'm pleased to note that it seems like the previous gen F4-423's paltry 4GB of memory is now a thing of the past when you compare it with this F8 SSD Plus' 16GB, or the F4-424 Pro's 32GB of DDR5 4800MT/s memory. First impressions are important, and the specs certainly are exciting while still managing to keep costs in check with the competition.

First impressions

The packaging looks quite different from the traditional TerraMaster packaging, which is usually a cream colored box. It looks quite premium, with a imagery of the F8 SSD Plus printed on the side of the box, along with the highlighting of some of its features. Inside the box everything you need to get yourself started is included.

In the box

• F8 SSD Plus TNAS device
• Power adapter
• LAN cable (CAT 6)
• Quick guide [full online guide]
• Limited warranty notice
• Screws (extra for M.2 slots)
• Box of heatsinks, thermal pads and rubber bands

Design

This thing is small and light! I placed a TEAMGROUP QX 4TB 3D NAND QLC SATA III SSD next to it for a size comparison; this thing is not taking up any space at all. Thanks to the textured finish it is not a fingerprint magnet, as there are no glossy parts at all.

It kind of looks like an external HDD, like a WD Elements Desktop, you could imagine it only ever fitting one traditional HDD, if it were built for that purpose, but here we can place eight M.2 SSDs in it.

The front is completely smooth, and you just have the F8 SSD Plus sticker. It would ve been nice to have a USB port here, but this thing is so small it really doesn't matter that they are on the back.

Coming around to the back, from top to bottom you have a Type-C USB port, two more Type A USB 3.2 Gen 2 (10 Gbps) ports, a single 10 GbE Ethernet port, a HDMI port and a connector for the barrel port power source. The reset pinhole can also be found on the outside of this unit, unlike the F4-424 Pro, where it is situated inside of the unit. There's no Kensington Security Slot present which is a bit of a shame considering it's a data storage device.

On the bottom there is a thumb screw that holds the outer casing in place.

On the left and right of the F8 SSD Plus you will find a TERRAMASTER logo imprint which does not double as vents to expel heat, which I found to be a bit of a strange decision, considering the logos literally flank the M.2 SSDs inside the F8 SSD Plus.

On the top, it consists mostly of a vent with the power button situated near the back, which is lit green when powered on. On the bottom there are quite large rubber feet that are almost as wide as the unit itself, they have a decent height too, between 0.5 and 1cm, this is to assist the fans which give the unit a decent surface clearance. The fans are intake, but considering there is no dust filter that might be a cheap mod you could do yourself.

Upon removing the thumb screw around the back, you can then slide the panel off to reveal the M.2 slots, four on each side, which are helpfully marked from NVME_1 to 8, and on one side, the single 16GB DDR5 4800MT/s SODIMM populated into the top slot.

As mentioned in my previous TerraMaster review, the support staff actually encourage installing whatever the hell you want on their devices, and I'm happy to report that the bootloader USB can be accessed quite easily, should you need to back it up, or swap it for something else, like Unraid or Xpenology.

As you can see in the above images, it is pretty simple to populate with the fiddly preinstalled M.2 screws, TerraMaster even include a couple more M.2 screws in the box, I guess in case you end up losing one or two of the little buggers!

Another nice surprise was the inclusion of heatsinks for the M.2 NVMe SSDs, and rubber bands, which I made use of for the four MP44Q 4TB NVMe SSDs that TEAMGROUP supplied us with. They are PCIe 4.0 x4 drives and currently cost $222.99 on Amazon or Newegg.

You might be able to see that the rubber bands look a bit stressed, that is because they are barely fit for purpose. I destroyed three getting them on the SSDs, luckily TerraMaster thought ahead here too and supplied more than is actually needed for eight SSDs.

Setup

BIOS

The F8 SSD Plus includes an Aptio BIOS from American Megatrends [image], and you can setup pretty much everything here except for the boot order, which is locked to the UEFI OS, however above that choice you can enable or disable booting to the TOS (USB bootloader) so this would still allow you to switch to a USB stick with an alternative bootloader and boot from it, or disable it to instead always start from the first disk with an OS installed on it.

Initial Setup

Because this ships with TOS 6 (which exits beta today, on Sep 19) the setup has changed a little from TOS 5.x. Upon connecting to the LAN and booting up, the F8 SSD Plus can be reached by navigating to http://tnas.local or if that doesn't work, by the local address assigned via DHCP which you can find using the TNAS PC desktop application, which is essentially a TerraMaster NAS finder.

The setup process is pretty straight forward, through a wizard, and in full below.

Gallery: TerraMaster F8 SSD Plus setup

One thing I'd like to note, is that the onboarding has decreased from fourteen (TOS 5.1) to ten steps, which is nice! They also spruced up the on-boarding process a bit so it looks a bit more professional over its successor, which was a mostly white screen with some text in the middle to guide the initial setup.

However, the last step with testing "Security Email" failed, because the built in SMTP service would not work properly (fixed in TOS 6.0.500). I ended up skipping this step, and after doing some troubleshooting I raised a ticket, who after confirming with a few ping tests, informed me that it was a known problem they were working on changing (as I also looked for guidance on the forums, and was eventually told something similar).

If you pre populate the F8 SSD Plus with SSDs, then part of that onboarding process starts to create a storage pool using TRAID, which is TerraMaster's own flavor of RAID 5, in which different size drives can be used, and no space is lost. Generally speaking, an equivalent sized disk will be used for redundancy, so this allows you to size up as you go replacing drives in the future.

Initialization of the pool took around ten hours, and left me with a volume of just over 11TB. It is possible to make use of SSD cache through Hyper Cache in the Storage Manager, but you would be sacrificing one M.2 slot, and do we really need it with an all SSD array? I am prepared to be schooled on that subject if I am wrong, but SSDs are immensely faster than HDDs, and SSD cache was created for the purpose of speeding up and offsetting read times of HDD platters.

The OS is also written to all SSDs that are placed in the unit, which results in around 40GB being taken up before you even start installing apps, but it allows for redundancy should one or more disks fail.

Following on from the onboarding SMTP failure, I ended up having to setup a custom SMTP service using my Gmail Workspace option, which did work. In addition, as you can see above, the F8 SSD Plus was set on China time out of the box, and they still have not fixed the odd notifications bug in which they stack, instead of appearing above one another. Clicking on one of the notifications fixes this behavior.

A CrystalDiskMark test on a mapped network drive from within a Windows 11 24H2 PC (image above) connected over a 2.5 GbE hub were well within acceptable ranges. Although the F8 SSD Plus supports 10GbE, my network only has 2.5GbE speeds.

However it must also be noted that each M.2 channel is limited to PCIe Gen 3.0 x1, so that caps drive speeds at 1GB/s while the 10Gb Ethernet port is capable of up to 1.25GB/s speeds!

TOS 6 comes with an App Center that has a bunch of handy programs you can install right off the bat such as Emby, Plex, Docker as well as in-house Backup and Surveillance solutions that aren't really in the scope of this review. As you can imagine, any media streaming services you would want to host off the F8 SSD Plus will work great, thanks to the Intel Core i3-N305 CPU and 16GB of DDR5 memory.

However, some of the apps could do with some work, or major upgrades. As I said in my previous review of the F4-424 Pro, after linking my Reolink video doorbell to Surveillance Manager, there is still no dedicated client app in Windows or on mobile like you can find with Synology Surveillance Client and there is no timeline, or event markers on the Live view.

Plex Server was still quite a bit outdated (Version 1.40.2.8396 from April, while current version is 1.41.0.8992), but upon receiving an update alert within the Plex Server app, the TPM was available for download and installed without any issues. I did have to manually set app permissions for the "Application user" for "plex" on the local library folder in TOS Shared Folder for media to start becoming available.

Before this review went live I was offered an update to TOS 6.0.500 which should be considered the stable version of TOS 6. The changelog is listed below:

Bug Fixes:

1. Fixed some issues with Domain.
2. Fixed some issues with Sleep Mode.
3. Fixed some issues with User.
4. Fixed some issues with Network.
5. Fixed some issues with User Group.
6. Fixed some issues with Share Links.
7. Fixed some issues with File Service.
8. Fixed some issues with File Manager.
9. Fixed some issues with TOS Desktop.
10. Fixed some issues with Shared Folder.
11. Fixed some issues with OTP Two-Factor Authentication

Enhancements:

1. Added Terminal functionality.
2. Added Debug Mode.
3. Optimized the restoration of file system snapshots.
4. Changed login authentication to a drag-and-drop method.

Quiet!

It goes without saying that this thing is really quiet. I had this sat next to my computer on my work desk for the past two weeks, and without spinning HDDs you aren't going to hear anything but (maybe) the bottom fans, but I couldn't hear them over the sounds of my main PC next to it. TerraMaster says that the F8 SSD Plus puts out up to 19dB of noise, and I believe them.

Conclusion

This is certainly a device with one thing in mind, being small and quiet, yet powerful. TerraMaster have paired some great specs here which result in an all-in-one solution for virtual machines, your media server needs, and cloud backup. If you can't really afford to go all out on M.2 disks (as they are still pretty expensive in large capacities) you can even expand on storage capacity by adding the 2-bay D5, or 4-bay D8 Hybrid DAS over a USB 3.2 (10Gbps) link and populating it with cheaper 2.5-inch SATA SSDs to expand the volume.

It's a niche device and you have to be ready for the initial cost of populating it, but if you can afford to, then it makes sense to opt for this quieter and energy efficient option. For a typical NAS, It'll do anything you throw at it.

Coupon

As of writing, you can save $100 off the MSRP by applying an in-page coupon on Amazon US, or the Amazon UK website, bringing the price down to $699.99 or £629.99 respectively, which perhaps sweetens the deal a bit further. My contact did let me know that the voucher is only valid for the first 100 buyers in the U.S., or UK.

The only downside I can still think of is the clear lack of community and even staff support on the official forums. I have had topics go unanswered for days, or there will be generic-type "we've noted this and passed it onto our developer team" type responses. If you are a bit comfortable with the command line, docker and setting up TrueNAS or Unraid, you'll be fine, you can do great things with this hardware. The apps are a bit lacking, and things don't always work as expected, such as an OpenVPN connection routing all traffic through it even though the remote gateway was disabled.

For me, this gets a resounding thumbs up. Future-proof yourself with the most powerful home media-class SSD NAS that fits in the palm of your hand, and you can buy right now.

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