Introduction

It's time to take a look at the big brother of the F4-424—the F4-424 Max—which kicks things up several notches in terms of hardware features. Not only are we looking at a much more powerful CPU—the Intel Core i5-1235U instead of the Intel N95—but the Max version also gets upgraded with a pair of 10 Gbps Ethernet ports. In addition, the Max version has a pair of PCIe 4.0 x4 NVMe slots for M.2 SSDs, whereas the plain F4-424 offers unspecified lane width PCIe 3.0 slots. The rest of the hardware remains mostly the same, although the more powerful processor is a fair bit more power hungry, especially under load, but more on that later in the review.

On the software side of things, we're looking at TOS 6, which is a rather big upgrade over TOS 5, as we covered in the TerraMaster F8 Plus review. That said, the regular F4-424 has also received the OS upgrade alongside TerraMaster's other recent models—so it's by no means unique to the more expensive models, but TOS 6 makes for an overall better impression of the product. We did bump into a minor issues with the F4-424 Max that the F8 Plus didn't seem to have issues with, but more on that in the review.

Specifications