TerraMaster F2-425 assessment: A robust NAS field for streaming & backups

Finest Costs Right this moment: TerraMaster F2-425 two-bay NAS

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

You may preserve the NAS in a bodily protected location, stream motion pictures and music to any of networked show, good 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 simply don’t must belief your knowledge to a broadband conduit and a few giant company that fairly frankly–wouldn’t give a darn about your knowledge in case you weren’t paying them to retailer it.

Specs

Should you’re not aware of a NAS field, it’s mainly a tiny laptop that’s designed for storing and distributing knowledge–a file server, within the vernacular, though it will probably do far more.

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

In some circumstances, you possibly can connect a keyboard by way of the NAS field’s USB port and a show by way of its DisplayPort or HDMI; nevertheless, whereas the F2-425 has an HDMI port, it’s used for terminal (aka command line) use solely. In contrast to 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 parts inside. It measures round 9-inches lengthy, 5.5-inches excessive, and 4.6-inches extensive, and it weighs only a tad underneath 4 kilos unpopulated (i.e., earlier than you add any of the drives which might be wanted for storage).

I’d like to say it’s ruggedly constructed, however on one of many rubberized ft 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 prime of this web page, the F2-425’s entrance panel is residence to the ability button, exercise and energy lights, a single a 10Gbps USB 3.2 Sort-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. Should you don’t, effectively….

The field’s rear panel options the two.5GbE ethernet port, two extra 10Gbps Sort-A USB ports, the ability 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 fee you’ll get from a 2.5GbE community gadget is 300MBps–solely a skosh quicker than as we speak’s high-capacity laborious disk drives (HDDs) (which might 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 in case you so want. Whereas HDDs and SATA SSDs may appear quaint within the age of NVMe (Non Risky Reminiscence Categorical), you possibly can stand 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 price $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 might advocate that mirror them (RAID 1) if there’s something irreplaceable on them. That halves the storage, but it surely reduces the prospect 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 typical residence person 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 Residing Community Alliance, a commerce group Sony based in 2003, and it’s turn out to be the baseline for even the included (and extra highly effective) Emby, Plex, and Jellyfin media servers. You may click on on the previous hyperlinks for TechHive’s opinions of these product, however Plex is probably the most mainstream possibility.

The Photographs app options “AI”, aka sample recognition, and it’ll auto-sort images primarily based on varied standards. Bittorrent purchasers and an iTunes server are additionally on board.

Utilizing the F2-425 for shopper backup

TNAS’s Centralized Backup is one in all my favourite NAS backup apps. You may in fact set up purchasers for it in your computer systems and gadgets, however you don’t must. Should you share the information in your gadgets, you possibly can entry them by way of Centralized Backup’s SMB (i.e., regular Home windows file sharing).

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

From there, you need to 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 industrial companies supported embody BackBlaze B2, Google Drive, OneDrive, Amazon S3, Dropbox, Field Baidu Cloud, Alibaba Cloud, and others​​. There’s Time Machine help for Apple customers, however iCloud isn’t supported.

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

Utilizing the F2-425 for safety cameras

Do you know that you simply don’t must pay by means of the nostril to have on-line surveillance distributors monitor your premises? Certainly, earlier than these companies have been obtainable, native safety techniques using hardwired or IP cameras (Web Protocol cameras that use your native community by way of Ethernet or Wi-Fi relatively than a web-based service.) have been the norm. IP cams are nonetheless available for not a complete lot of money.

And you may nonetheless entry IP cameras remotely, though that requires configuring the ports in your router in an effort to attain the F2-425 from outdoors your property community. Alternatively, you need to use the TerraMaster TNAS Internet portal/forwarding service, which is a far simpler and safer technique to go about it.

To that finish, TerraMaster gives its Surveillance Supervisor app (proven above) which is able to accommodate a number of ONVIF-compliant (Open Community Video Interface Discussion board) IP cams with out costly extra licenses because the bins from QNAP and Synology sometimes require. Yay TerraMaster!

What are the FS-425’s different options?

Whereas media streaming and backup can be crucial options for the typical person, 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 net browser; and there’s a Docker host, so you are able to do the identical by way of Docker modules.

As to the fundamentals, the F2-425 runs the BTRFS (Higher File System) which options copy-on-write, snapshots, and knowledge scrubbing. There’s additionally deduplication, MyBB and phpBB bulletin boards, NextCloud shared storage, FTP shopper, Portainer (like Docker), an online server), Java. iBos, and lots of different stuff that IT varieties love.

A fairly latest (6.7/2024) model of WordPress is included (preserve it up to date in case you determine to make use of it) if you wish to create and host your individual web site. Watch out with that. I used to be malware-attacked internet hosting my very own web site (I used to be operating a really outdated and susceptible model of WordPress), and solely diligent backup insurance policies saved me.

I’m not completely in opposition to internet hosting your individual web site, however accomplish that provided that there’s nothing else of significance on the field, and preserve the positioning consistently backed as much as much less susceptible exterior media. The open-source ClamAV antivirus engine is offered as a TNAS app, although I’m unsure it will shield you from a WordPress exploit.

TerraMaster F2-425 efficiency

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

On condition that 4K video requires solely round 25- to 50Mbps, the the F2-425 ought to simply stream video to a number of purchasers concurrently. And shopper backups, whereas not terribly speedy, shouldn’t take various minutes every. A minimum of after the preliminary slog of some hours at roughly 250GB per hour. This all, in fact, is dependent upon the quantity of knowledge concerned.

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

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

Must you purchase the TerraMaster F2-425?

Whereas I’ve historically really useful QNAP and Synology because the go-to distributors within the client NAS area, 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,” akin to safety digicam license charges the best way 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.