Tested: This budget NAS box punches way above its price tag

Price When Reviewed

$250 (with out arduous drives), plus transport if bought direct from TerraMaster

Best Prices Today: TerraMaster F2-425 two-bay NAS

$224.99

$249.99

Millions of individuals pay month in, month out to retailer their knowledge within the cloud, seemingly oblivious to the very fact they will retailer their knowledge privately, in their very own residence, on their very own community, with none recurring prices in any respect. All you want is a NAS field (Network Attached Storage) just like the TerraMaster F2-425 reviewed right here related to your router.

You can hold the NAS in a bodily secure location, stream films and music to any of networked show, sensible TV, or audio system, in addition to again up your the images, movies, and different knowledge saved on any of your gadgets to it. And the perfect half is that you just don’t have to belief your knowledge to a broadband conduit and a few giant company that fairly frankly–wouldn’t give a darn about your knowledge for those who weren’t paying them to retailer it.

Specifications

If you’re not conversant in a NAS field, it’s principally a tiny laptop that’s designed for storing and distributing knowledge–a file server, within the vernacular, though it might do rather more.

NAS attaches through an ethernet cable, or in some circumstances Wi-Fi (the F2-425 is hardwired solely). You entry the information saved on a NAS field through your working system’s (Windows Explorer, the MacOS Finder, and many others.) community shopping and administer it or entry its digital machines and apps with a Web browser.

In some circumstances, you possibly can connect a keyboard through the NAS field’s USB port and a show through its DisplayPort or HDMI; nevertheless, whereas the F2-425 has an HDMI port, it’s used for terminal (aka command line) use solely. Unlike some NAS bins, this one has no graphical desktop or direct streaming media output.

The all-black TerraMaster F2-425 is constructed largely from plastic with some metallic framing to safe the elements inside. It measures round 9-inches lengthy, 5.5-inches excessive, and 4.6-inches huge, and it weighs only a tad beneath 4 kilos unpopulated (i.e., earlier than you add any of the drives which can be wanted for storage).

I’d like to say it’s ruggedly constructed, however on one of many rubberized toes was falling off after just a few drags throughout the tough floor you see within the images. It’ll do, however don’t set it behind your jeep whereas off-roading and count on it to outlive.

As you possibly can see within the picture on the high of this web page, the F2-425’s entrance panel is residence to the facility button, exercise and energy lights, a single a 10Gbps USB 3.2 Type-A port for rapidly copying knowledge from the NAS, and the 2 quick-change drive bays. There’s no drive-locking mechanism, however we’re hoping you belief everybody in your house. If you don’t, properly….

The field’s rear panel options the two.5GbE ethernet port, two extra 10Gbps Type-A USB ports, the facility jack, an HDMI port, and a big fan to maintain issues cool. There’s additionally a pinhole reset button that I had to make use of since I couldn’t bear in mind the primary password I used. Dummy.

The quickest switch charge you’ll get from a 2.5GbE community machine is 300MBps–solely a skosh sooner than in the present day’s high-capacity arduous disk drives (HDDs) (which may switch information at round 275MBps), however slower than SATA strong state drives (SSDs) (they will carry out file transfers at 550MBps). Streaming even high-resolution 4K video, nevertheless, requires switch speeds lower than 50Mbps (that’s megabits per second), so that you’ll have bandwidth to spare with the F2-425.

You’ll discover two quick-change drive bays contained in the F2-425 that may accommodate both 2.5- or 3.5-inch HDDs or 2.5-inch SATA SSDs, and you may hot-swap drives for those who so need. While HDDs and SATA SSDs might sound quaint within the age of NVMe (Non Volatile Memory Express), you possibly can rise up to 72TB of storage with the previous, however solely 32TB with the latter–after which solely with a pair of VectoTech 16TB V-MAX drives that value $1,700 every! Normies can determine on 8TB with two $250 4TB consumer-grade SATA SSDs (4TB if configured as RAID 1).

And in at the very least the case of HDDs, I’d advocate that mirror them (RAID 1) if there’s something irreplaceable on them. That halves the storage, but it surely reduces the possibility of catastrophic knowledge loss if one drive fails in striped RAID 0.

The processor is a four-core Intel Celeron N5095 and there’s 4GB of DRAM on board–simply sufficient to run the Linux-based TNAS working system that’s offered, however not highly effective sufficient to host the Roon music server. (Roon recommends having at the very least an Intel Core i3 processor and 8MB of DRAM.)

Of most curiosity to the common residence consumer would be the F2-425’s video, music, and picture options. For streaming video and music, there’s TerraMaster’s personal Multimedia Server, which leverages DLNA. The acronym stands for Digital Living Network Alliance, a commerce group Sony based in 2003, and it’s grow to be the baseline for even the included (and extra highly effective) Emby, Plex, and Jellyfin media servers. You can click on on the previous hyperlinks for TechHive’s opinions of these product, however Plex is essentially the most mainstream possibility.

The Photos app options “AI”, aka sample recognition, and it’ll auto-sort images based mostly on numerous standards. Bittorrent shoppers and an iTunes server are additionally on board.

Using the F2-425 for consumer backup

TNAS’s Centralized Backup is one in all my favourite NAS backup apps. You can after all set up shoppers for it in your computer systems and gadgets, however you don’t should. If you share the information in your gadgets, you possibly can entry them through Centralized Backup’s SMB (i.e., regular Windows file sharing).

In different phrases, activate file sharing in your laptop or machine, share the folders you need backed up, then add them as sources to a Centralized Backup file server backup.

From there, you should use TNAS’s on-line storage backup software program to sync your backed-up knowledge to the cloud, and/or sync it from the cloud to the F2-425. The business companies supported embrace BackBlaze B2, Google Drive, OneDrive, Amazon S3, Dropbox, Box Baidu Cloud, Alibaba Cloud, and others​​. There’s Time Machine assist for Apple customers, however iCloud shouldn’t be supported.

On a facet be aware, I extremely advocate maintaining an area copy of your valuable images. There have been no large losses of information from a serious on-line repository, but it surely’s an more and more harmful on-line world.

Using the F2-425 for safety cameras

Did you understand that you just don’t have to pay via the nostril to have on-line surveillance distributors monitor your premises? Indeed, earlier than these companies had been obtainable, native safety techniques using hardwired or IP cameras (Internet Protocol cameras that use your native community through Ethernet or Wi-Fi somewhat than a web-based service.) had been the norm. IP cams are nonetheless available for not a complete lot of money.

And you possibly can nonetheless entry IP cameras remotely, though that requires configuring the ports in your router so as to attain the F2-425 from outdoors your house community. Alternatively, you should use the TerraMaster TNAS Web portal/forwarding service, which is a far simpler and safer option to go about it.

To that finish, TerraMaster gives its Surveillance Manager app (proven above) which can accommodate a number of ONVIF-compliant (Open Network Video Interface Forum) IP cams with out costly extra licenses because the bins from QNAP and Synology usually require. Yay TerraMaster!

What are the FS-425’s different options?

While media streaming and backup shall be a very powerful options for the common consumer, the TerraMaster can also be appropriate for SMBs (small to medium-sized companies) and even enterprise use. It helps digital machines, too, so you possibly can compute over your internet browser; and there’s a Docker host, so you are able to do the identical through Docker modules.

As to the fundamentals, the F2-425 runs the BTRFS (Better File System) which options copy-on-write, snapshots, and knowledge scrubbing. There’s additionally deduplication, MyBB and phpBB bulletin boards, SubsequentCloud shared storage, FTP consumer, Portainer (like Docker), an internet server), Java. iBos, and numerous different stuff that IT sorts love.

A fairly current (6.7/2024) model of WordPress is included (hold it up to date for those who determine to make use of it) if you wish to create and host your individual web site. Be cautious with that. I used to be malware-attacked internet hosting my very own web site (I used to be working a really outdated and weak model of WordPress), and solely diligent backup insurance policies saved me.

I’m not completely towards internet hosting your individual web site, however accomplish that provided that there’s nothing else of significance on the field, and hold the positioning consistently backed as much as much less weak exterior media. The open-source ClamAV antivirus engine is on the market as a TNAS app, although I’m undecided it could shield you from a WordPress exploit.

TerraMaster F2-425 efficiency

While not fairly the quickest 2.5Gbe NAS field I’ve examined, the F2-425 isn’t far sufficient off the tempo to fret about. Generally talking, with a single 2TB SATA SSD inside, learn and write speeds diversified between 250- and 300MBps.

Given that 4K video requires solely round 25- to 50Mbps, the the F2-425 ought to simply stream video to a number of shoppers concurrently. And consumer backups, whereas not terribly speedy, shouldn’t take quite a lot of minutes every. At least after the preliminary slog of some hours at roughly 250GB per hour. This all, after all, is dependent upon the quantity of information concerned.

Fast sufficient apart, if you wish to know what 10GbE and NVMe convey to the desk, take a look at my overview of the TerraMaster D8 SSD Plus in Macworld. Short story: Almost 1GBps finest case, although bigger NVMe SSDs are expensive.

One factor I don’t like about TNAS is that it doesn’t multitask notably properly. For occasion, I couldn’t retreat to the desktop and hearth up the file supervisor whereas putting in an app. That’s not a deal killer, however there are 4 cores. Let’s use em’!

Should you purchase the TerraMaster F2-425?

While I’ve historically really useful QNAP and Synology because the go-to distributors within the client NAS house, TerraMaster’s TNAS OS has matured to the purpose the place it’s each bit as succesful, and the corporate doesn’t nickel-and-dime you for “extras,” resembling safety digicam license charges the way in which these different distributors now do.

So sure, I’m recommending the F2-425 as a best choice in a two-bay NAS field for multimedia streaming, backup, residence file sharing, and storing video from ONVIF IP cams. Good job TerraMaster.