Power

The power consumption of the Intel Processor N95 SoC is pretty frugal, but a NAS as a whole is obviously using a lot more power than just the processor. The typical power draw for the F4-424 landed at around 30 watts, which isn't half bad with a SoC TDP of 15 watts and our test results align with TerraMaster's power usage claims. That's with four drives in RAID 5 and two SSDs installed, although with the drives seeing a bit heavier usage, this increased to just under 40 watts, with peaks at up to 45 watts at times. Idle power was pretty good as well, with the TerraMaster F4-424 going down to a mere 18 watts when idling. We'd ideally like to see this number being even lower, especially considering that the SoC used was designed for budget laptops, and it should really be able to idle at even lower draw, especially as the hard drives we used to test with can idle at 0.3 Watts. Overall not a bad result though.

There's no user control for anything power related, outside hard drive sleep time, Wake on LAN, auto power on and a power on/off scheduler. This is a shame as some user control would've been nice to see here, where the NAS could be forced into lower power modes when being lightly used.

Noise

The 120 mm fan from Shenzhen Yongyihao Electronics Co., Ltd is the same as in the D8 Hybrid, but it produces slightly different noise, possibly due to the different internal hardware and the fact that it actually has to cool a SoC in this case, rather than some comparatively basic electronics in the expansion unit. However, it does appear to operate at fairly similar noise levels when in use, although it got slightly noisier when the NAS was heavily loaded. In practical use, the hard drives produced far more noise than the fan and this was also noticeable during the noise testing, as the noise meter would jump as soon as the hard drives made some unexpected noise. At a typical distance from the F4-424 it's barely audible, which is good for those that can't hide their NAS in a cupboard, basement, attic or similar.

Temperature

Unfortunately there's no means of getting a temperature reading from TOS, but it seems like the massive heatsink on the Intel Processor N95 is doing its job, since at no point did the exhaust air feel excessively hot. Although we lacked any means of measuring the SoC temperature, TOS does provide the drive temperature of the mechanical drives and the SSDs. Here we saw idle hard drive temperatures of between 31-34 degrees C and idle SSD temperatures of under 30 degrees C. Due to the F4-424 being limited to 2.5 Gbps Ethernet, the temperature of the SSD's never exceeded 45 degrees C, even after lengthy file copying sessions. Even so, we'd like to be able to fit a small heatsink on the SSDs, something the current chassis design doesn't allow for.