TerraMaster F2-212 review: Entry-level NAS with options

Price When Reviewed

$169.99

Best Prices Today: TerraMaster F2-212

$169.99

$169.99

TerraMaster has caught with an aesthetic of an aluminum tube with silver-painted plastic end-caps that has wanted a revamp for some years.

With the F2-212, reviewed right here, and its F4-212 bigger brother, a brand new minimalist styling has been revealed that makes these merchandise look a lot nearer to these of Synology in look.

However, TerraMaster at all times likes to take the trail much less worn, and the F2-212 diverges from the earlier TerraMaster F2-210 in some essential ways in which may make this the entry-level NAS to personal.

Depending on the mannequin chosen, F2-212 or F4-212, this is identical NAS system, however the F2-212 has twin drive bays, whereas the F2-214 presents locations for 4 2.5- or 3.5in HDD or SSDs. In addition, TerraMaster additionally makes a 3rd associated machine, the U4-212, which is a rack-mounted chassis with 4 drive bays.

These entry-level machines lack the Intel Celeron processors, NVMe slots and upgradable reminiscence, that are options that TerraMaster’s higher-end NAS merchandise provide.

But even with out a few of these issues, the F2-212 has a couple of options that can shock many and may concern the likes of Synology and QNAP.

Design & Build

• New styling
• No reminiscence upgrades
• Drive trays don’t lock

As talked about, the F2-212 has embraced a brand new black minimalist look that’s decidedly extra business-like than the earlier silver TerraMaster motif.

While simplicity is sweet, on this case, the designers might need taken the function discount barely too far. As a consequence, the entrance of the NAS sports activities solely two drive bays, a label and three tiny LED indicators. There aren’t any front-facing USB ports, and even the facility button is relocated to the rear.

On the again is the facility change, two USB ports and a gigabit LAN port, together with a safety slot and the facility provide inlet. The exterior development is solely plastic, however the texture and embedded logos make for a sophisticated look, even when TerraMaster caught a large yellow help sticker on one aspect.

Inside is a pressed metal cage on which the plastic drive trays experience, and the motherboard is vertically mounted. A sneaky look inside reveals that the reminiscence shouldn’t be slot-mounted, however it’s a part of the mainboard and, due to this fact not upgradable.

Instead of the everyday laptop computer PSU, the F2-212 has a region-specific energy socket brick.

One of the marginally odd and probably problematic options is the drive trays that aren’t like every from earlier TerraMaster designs I’ve seen.

It has a sprung launch mechanism that doesn’t lock, so inquisitive fingers may simply dislodge a drive whereas it was working, leading to disaster.

The engineering TerraMaster used reveals that the F2-212 was designed from the attitude of being cheap to assemble however inherently dependable. But these priorities haven’t considerably undermined its NAS performance for individuals who need a simple-to-deploy system for media serving or private cloud providers.

Specs & Features

• Realtek 1619B SoC
• Only two USB ports
• One is USB 3.0

Where the extra highly effective NAS machines are actually utilizing Intel Celeron or AMD Ryzen platforms, entry-level designs just like the F2-212 nonetheless use ARM SoC techniques on which this whole class of machine was conceived.

That stated, the SoC on this NAS is a current design, the Realtek 1619B, a chip initially made to be used in TV packing containers. It makes use of Cortex-A55 microarchitecture and consists of measurement cores that may every run at as much as 1.3GHz.

The most reminiscence capability on that SoC is 4GB, however on this implementation, it’s equipped with simply 1GB of RAM with no means to extend that quantity. Alongside the hex-core CPU, this SoC additionally has a Mali-G51 MP3 GPU with transcoding skills that may convert video in real-time.

A function of this silicon that isn’t used right here by TerraMaster is that it has built-in Wi-Fi help and Bluetooth, however it does use USB 3.0 and Gigabit Ethernet performance.

USB is concentrated into two ports, one being USB 3.0 (aka USB 3.2 Gen 1) and the opposite USB 2.0.

If this design has a weak spot, it’s that just one port has the sooner USB 3.0 spec and that there are solely two USB ports in complete. USB 2.0 ports are high-quality for connecting printers however for these wanting to make use of exterior drives or a 2.5GbE LAN port adapter, solely having a single port for this use could possibly be limiting.

It may be attainable to make use of a USB hub to assist mitigate this situation, however I wouldn’t purchase it based mostly on that assumption. TerraMaster does make a 2.5GbE LAN adapter that can work with this machine, in order that may be the best way to go.

As every drive bay can take as much as 22TB capability drives, you may put as much as 44TB on this one tiny enclosure. Or, you may select to reinforce the efficiency by mixing a standard arduous drive with a SATA SSD.

Performance

• Single Gigabit LAN
• 1GB of reminiscence
• USB 2.5GbE LAN adapter possibility

With the F2-212 out of the field, one of the best efficiency you may realistically anticipate is round 115MB/s over the Gigabit Ethernet, which is the theoretical restrict for this interface.

As a single standard arduous drive ought to have the ability to attain that velocity nearly no matter its specification, utilizing an SSD to cache that drive wouldn’t present any profit.

However, with a 2.5GbE LAN port that may be added as an improve, the velocity of that interface is quicker than a single standard drive. In that situation, one strategy is to cache a single HDD drive utilizing a SATA SSD, or one other to make use of two HDDs in a stripe for efficiency in a RAID 0 configuration.

The F2-212 can use any of those two choices or a 3rd methodology of SATA SSDs as storage to ship greater than sufficient efficiency to saturate the LAN, even at 2.5GbE.

With solely 1GB of RAM and no means to improve it, the variety of apps you may run isn’t huge, however it could be sufficient to run Plex and private cloud providers.

Those eager to run numerous apps might want to have a look at a NAS that isn’t ARM-powered, utilizing an Intel or AMD CPU to deal with extra processing and nice RAM.

Compared with older designs, the Realtek 1619B is a lot better, and as a quad-core processor, it doesn’t are likely to get overrun like among the prior dual-core NAS processors. This chip helps show output, however there aren’t any HDMI ports on the F2-212.

As already revealed, it’s attainable to place a USB 2.5GbE LAN adapter on this machine, though, on the time of writing our assessment, I haven’t seen this merchandise to check how that addon performs.

The snag with utilizing this selection is that reaching the 230MB/s ranges of that interface would require both two arduous drives mounted in RAID 0 (striped) mode or one drive with an SSD caching studying and writing.

With a machine with solely two bays and a single USB 3.0 port, selections must be made that may be prevented on a NAS with extra bays or USB ports.

That stated, in comparison with many NAS makers that don’t enable for two.5GbE adapters or to make use of SSDs as storage or cache on their entry-level {hardware}, it supplies the F2-212 with extra choices than most options.

Price & Availabilty

The value of the TerraMaster F2-212 is simply £169 within the UK on Amazon, and the USB 2.5GbE LAN adapter is one other £30 for individuals who need that further efficiency.

US prospects can discover it for $169.99 on Amazon and Newegg.com, which appears cheap for an entry-level NAS with this specification.

One difficulty for TerraMaster is that the virtually identically specified Synology DS223j is simply round $25 extra in most areas, and it helps the Synology DSM 7.2 OS and its related software program platform.

However, the Synology NAS doesn’t help USB 2.5GbE LAN adapters, and a few triple-A DSM app titles are lacking from these made obtainable for the DS223j.

Therefore, if you’re shopping for the DS223j due to the Synology apps, it is advisable verify that the software program you need to use is supported on that machine, and also you additionally want to think about that the place the F2-212 has a number of growth pathways which can be lacking from the DS223j.

The DS223j does have two USB 3.2 Gen 1 ports, permitting for extra USB storage growth if you happen to intend to make use of it for file sharing.

Should you purchase the TerraMaster F2-212?

It’s arduous to speak in regards to the F2-212 with out mentioning the Synology DS223j since, on paper, these have very related specs.

With the prevalence of the Synology software program packages and a preferable USB structure, the additional value of the DS223j is tempting.

However, whereas the {hardware} is analogous, TerraMaster designers are a lot much less paranoid about damaging the gross sales of the higher-specification NAS from this model. Therefore, the F2-212 consists of the power to improve to 2.5 GbE and use SATA SSDs for storage and caching, that are options lacking from the Synology NAS.

Where Gigabit Ethernet limits the DS223j, the F2-212 can switch information at twice that velocity, saving numerous time for these dumping massive video information to and from their NAS.

Also, on the F2-212, utilizing an SSD internally is worth it to cache a single massive HDD, whereas, with the Synology DS223j, there’s little level because the HDD can saturate the LAN port.

You can use 22TB drives on this NAS, which permits for as much as 44TB internally if you happen to don’t use RAID 1 mirror mode. An outlay of $550 ($350 for a single Seagate Iron Wolf 22TB) should purchase a system with sufficient area for a humungous quantity of flicks, music and pictures.

That’s an enormous motive for purchasing this NAS over different entry-level machines, because it presents options Synology doesn’t embrace in its home-orientated merchandise, solely in enterprise fashions.

Overall, with a complete value of round $200 for the F2-212, together with the two.5 GbE adapter and the power to make use of any capability SATA drives, that is the right first NAS for a lot of prospects.

Although, for these with greater than two drives helpful, its F4-212 brother may be the higher alternative.

Specs

• CPU: Realtek 1619B
• GPU: ARM Mali-G51 MP3
• RAM: 1GB DDR4 (not upgradable)
• Drive Bays: 2x 3.5/2.5 SATA
• M.2 Drive Slots: N/A
• Maximum Drives with Expansion: 7 utilizing D5-300C growth
• USB: 1x USB 3.2 Gen1, 1x USB 2.0
• Video Outputs: N/A
• Raid Types: RAID 0/1, Single, JBOD
• Weight: 1.3 Kg
• Dimensions: 222 x 119 x 154 mm
• Networking: 1x 1GbE Ethernet (100/1000)
• OS: TOS 5.1
• Internal File Systems: Btrfs, EXT4
• External File Systems: EXT4, NTFS, FAT32, HFS+, exFAT
• OS Languages: English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Magyar, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Turkish, Portuguese and Russian

This assessment initially appeared on techadvisor.com.