TerraMaster F4-424 Pro review: it's the most powerful media class 4-bay NAS on the market

TerraMaster is a brand we've seen here before at Neowin. I mostly praised the 2-bay F2-223, the 4-bay F4-423, and more recently, the 2-bay F2-212 for being far cheaper than the competition, but at the same time, being a capable file backup and media server options. Now they are back with the 4-bay F4-424 Pro which I have been taking a look at for the past couple of weeks.

I've had some experience with these devices, having owned a QNAP TS-253Be, and Synology DS720+ and DS923+ but for me, I only acquired them to do local and cloud backups and run my home theater solution using a combination of Emby and Plex.

All of the aforementioned NAS devices I've owned are media-class, meaning they fully support having Emby or Plex installed on them and streaming over the network, 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, compared to the F4-423, it comes with an Intel i3-N305 which 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.

One of the things I said last time was that it was disappointing that the F4-423 only came with 4GB (even though for a limited time, buyers could claim a second 4GB SODIMM with proof of purchase), and this thing comes along with 32GB of DDR5 4800MT/s memory. First impressions are important, and the specs certainly are exciting while still managing to keep relative costs down in comparison to the competition.

First impressions

The packaging is nothing to write home about, and again, the 4-bay option did not come in a comically-oversized box. Minimal packing materials were used. Everything you need to get yourself started is included.

In the box

• F4-424 Pro TNAS device
• Power adapter
• LAN cable (CAT 6)
• Quick guide [full online guide]
• Limited warranty notice
• Screws (for HDD bays)
• Stickers

Design

This follows the same design principle as the D8 Hybrid we reviewed back in April. It is completely plastic and has a textured look and feel. Thanks to the textured finish it is not a fingerprint magnet, as there are no glossy parts at all.

Some key differences from the F4-423 include placing the power button on the back, and easier access to the F4-424 Pro through a panel on the right of the unit being able to slide off after removing two screws to access the two NVMe M.2 slots and single SODIMM connector, which is far better than having to literally dismantle the F4-423 just to get to the M.2 slots and memory.

Although the dimensions of the F4-424 Pro are slightly smaller than that of the F4-423, it is slightly longer in depth, and I think this is mainly due to the single larger fan, which is completely inside the unit, rather than, as in the case of the F4-423, the dual fans sort of protruding out of the back of the unit.

On the front, you just have your four bays along with LED indicators for the HDDs, and power. It would have been nice to have a USB port on the front, but alas, no such joy here.

Around the back, from top to bottom you have the power button, a HDMI port, USB Type-C and USB 3.2 Gen 2 (10 Gbps) Type A ports, two 2.5 GbE Ethernet ports, and a connector for the barrel port power source. There's no Kensington Security Slot present which is a bit of a shame considering it's a data storage device.

On the left and right of the F4-424 Pro you will find an enlarged TERRAMASTER logo imprint which doubles as a vent to expel heat.

On the bottom, there are some holes to assist ventilation. The rubber feet are attached with a weak glue sticker, and actually cause them to detach from the unit if you are shifting it around on your desk, this is mainly due to the great contact that the thick rubber feet make with any surface; a way to possibly improve the feet not coming loose is for them to have "flaps" that tuck into holes in the plastic which is something GEEKOM employed with their far smaller rubber feet in the GT13 Pro Mini PC.

Upon removing the screw above the power button and below the power connector on the left side on the back of the F4-424 Pro, and then turning it on its side, you can then slide the panel off to the left and lift it off to reveal the NVMe M.2 slots and single SODIMM slot connector, which is pre populated with a single 32GB DDR5 4800MT/s module.

As you can see, the reset pinhole has been moved to the inside of the unit; I guess to stop people accidentally resetting the unit? In any case, you will now be required to take off the side panel if you need to hardware reset the F4-424 Pro to factory settings.

TerraMaster support staff actually encourage installing whatever the hell you want on their devices, but after dismantling the F4-424 Pro, it certainly is not made easy to do so, as the bootloader USB stick is tucked into the unit with the metal frame preventing it from being removed. This results in having to remove the motherboard from the frame so you can then access the USB key and swap it out for a similar sized one with a bootloader of your own flavor of NAS OS, such as TrueNAS, Unraid, or maybe Xpenology.

A word of advice though, if you do decide to take it apart, don't use a electric screwdriver, or if you do, ensure it is on the weakest setting, because I discovered when putting back the screws that the setting of my electric screwdriver (on 3 of a possible 17) destroyed the plastic threading of the screwhole. It's the first time I've encountered such an issue after literally taking apart tons of devices over the past few years for reviews.

Setup

BIOS

The F4-424 Pro 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 UTOS (USB bootloader) so this would still allow you to switch 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

Setup is exactly the same as the F2-423, so there will be no surprises here. Upon connecting to the LAN and booting up, the F4-424 Pro 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: F4-424 Pro Setup

A pretty cool feature of the F4-424 Pro is that it supports installing TOS 5 to the NVMe M.2 SSD, so to ensure that actually happened, I left out the HDDs and only added one WD_BLACK 500GB SN750. This creates a small partition with the OS installed on it and leaves the rest (around 455GB) to be used as a Storage Pool/volume, which is what I did, so apps will get installed to volume 1 on the SSD.

After completing setup I added three Seagate X22 20TB disks and proceeded to setup the storage pool in TRAID, which is TerraMaster's own flavor of RAID5 that allows mixing disk sizes without losing any of the available space on the drives, this process took around 29 hours.

After the Storage Pool was completed and I could create a second volume, another cool feature of this F4-424 Pro is allowing me to use the second NVMe M.2 slot with a 250GB Samsung 970 Evo Plus SSD as Hypercache.

Even though I used an ICY BOX Aluminum Alloy Heatsink heatsink on the Samsung 970 Evo Plus SSD, TerraMaster says on its product page, that there is:

"a dedicated ventilation channel for M.2 SSDs to accommodate hybrid storage applications. Even under full load, the temperature of any M.2 SSDs can be kept within a reasonable range."

and I can confirm that as of writing, the disk temperature for the Hypercache is reporting at 37°C.

The OS is also written to all HDDs that are placed in the unit, which results in around 45GB being taken up per disk and allows for redundancy should one or more disks fail; however, volume 1 where the apps are installed and stored are not mirrored across drives, so you would have to consider recovery options in the case of that single SSD failing.

A CrystalDiskMark test on a mapped network drive from within Windows 11 23H2 PC (image above) connected over a 2.5 GbE hub were well within acceptable ranges.

TOS 5.1 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 F4-424 Pro will work great, thanks to the Intel Core i3-N305 CPU and 32GB of DDR5 memory.

TOS 6

However, some of the apps could do with some work, or major upgrades. I linked my Reolink video doorbell to Surveillance Manager, but there is 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.

I upgraded to TOS 6, which is still in beta and slated for release in September, but the same issues still persist. We can only hope that come September, TerraMaster has addressed the issues and release updates to the native apps to make them a bit more competitive with Synology.

Another example is the default TFM Backup app, when you create backup jobs through the application with scheduled tasks, these are added to the default Scheduled Tasks of TOS, but when those TFM Backup jobs are deleted, the tasks are left in Task Scheduler with no way to remove them. The only workaround is to uninstall TFM Backup, which then does delete the dummy TFM Backup Scheduled Task jobs. These issues have been reported in the TerraMaster Community as far back as December 2022, but fixes for such issues have yet to materialize.

In addition, Docker Engine is required to be installed alongside Docker Manager, but when you have to reboot TOS 5 or 6, Docker Engine fails to start and must be "Enabled" in the App Manager, other times it will start as expected, it is a completely random issue, reported to TerraMaster by end users, however there's no fix yet.

On the plus side, TOS 6 has received some praise, again I can only hope that TerraMaster does address the issues people have been reporting, considering the beta became available back in March.

It's also quiet. I had this sat next to my computer on my work desk for the past two weeks, and I did wonder if the noise I was accustomed to with NAS devices would annoy me, but all I could hear was a soft whirring of the rear fan when the disks were not actively copying or reading data.

Conclusion

What it comes down to is the quality of the F4-424 Pro, and I can say for $699.99 (Amazon) it's a great device, but recommending it will depend on the individual's use case. If you're just looking for a small NAS device to back up your files and take care of your home theater streaming, then it is a great device to purchase. It provides great performance, takes up little space, and is on the whole, very quiet. Four bays affords proper redundancy using TRAID or RAID 5, and 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.

On the other hand, it is $100 more than the current gen Synology's DS923+ which costs $599.99, or the slightly cheaper $565 QNAP TS-464, but the F4-424 Pro is simply more powerful than those two devices with its Intel Core i3-N305 and 32GB of DDR5 memory versus the weaker AMD Ryzen Embedded R1600 with 4GB DDR4 memory in the DS923+, or the older Intel Celeron N5095 with 8GB DDR4 memory in the QNAP TS-464.

The only downside 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. It truly is the most powerful home media-class NAS you can buy right now.

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