Introduction

It's been almost four and a half years since we last took a look at a NAS from TerraMaster and a lot of things have changed since then, Not only has the company released a major update to its TOS NAS operating system, but it has also overhauled the hardware design since then. We've already seen the new 4-bay NAS housing in the TerraMaster D8 Hybrid DAS review. The TerraMaster F4-424 is a pretty standard 4-bay NAS from the outside, and it's a mid-range consumer/SOHO device in TerraMaster's lineup of products. The F4-424 is built around the Intel Processor N95, which is a quad-core Alder Lake-N based SoC with a 15 W TDP originally intended for mobile devices, but it has found its way into a range of compact computing devices. TerraMaster didn't skimp on the RAM, as the N95 SoC is paired with an 8 GB DDR5 4800 MHz SO-DIMM RAM module as standard and this can be swapped out for a 16 GB module if more RAM is needed.

Network connectivity comes courtesy of two 2.5 Gbps Ethernet ports and the F4-424 also has a pair of 10 Gbps USB 3.2 ports, one Type-A and one Type-C. Finally, there's an HDMI 2.1 port, a 12 V power jack and a power button around the back, alongside the 120 mm cooling fan. It's not what we'd call a generous amount of connectivity options, but it's most likely more than enough for potential customers of this specific NAS. The Type-C USB port would be ideal for connecting something like the D8 Hybrid to the F4-424, which also means that future storage expansion or 1:1 backups are pretty straightforward to perform. TerraMaster offers a range of DAS units that are more affordable than the D8 Hybrid if all you want is space for extra hard disk drives.

The F4-424 ships with TOS 5.1, but TerraMaster is in the final stages of releasing TOS 6, which will revamp many parts of the operating system, although the UI/UX is getting a smaller change than with the move from TOS 4 to 5. We've been unable to figure out which underlying OS TOS is based on, but the current version is using the 5.15 Linux kernel which is an LTS (Long Term Support) kernel from the end of 2021. TOS 6 will move to kernel 6.1 which is yet another LTS kernel, this time from the end of 2022. This seems to be a commonality between all the NAS manufacturers and although LTS kernels are still supported by the Linux foundation, we'd like to see more up-to-date software than something that's a couple of years old at best. That said, TerraMaster has built a rather decent user interface by now, and we'll be going into a bit more detail, even though we won't be doing a deep dive into everything on offer in this review. What is very noticeable compared to Ugreen's UGOS Pro NAS OS, is that TOS is much more fully featured, even though it might not have feature parity with the likes of QNAP and Synology. There are a lot more native apps on offer and there's also an additional 135 community supported additions available. As a consumer or small business product, most things are in place here, from databases and programming languages to WordPress and NVR software, as well as media servers and backup software of all kinds. There's also support for Docker if the standard set of applications don't quite fill your needs. Anyhow, let's take a closer look at what's on offer.

Specifications