TerraMaster F4-420 NAS (Network Attached Storage ) Device Review

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TerraMaster F4-420 NAS

Lets talk about its design

Design

The appearance of the F4-420 is something that you’ll either like or hate, but it’s consistent with the TerraMaster range of NAS boxes and its passion for rounded silver surfaces.

Essentially, it’s a metal and plastic construction that feels robust even if it doesn’t break any new ground in terms of style or imagination.

On the front of this unit are four vertically mounted 3.5-inch drive bays, an array of LED indicator lights and the power button. Around the back are two USB ports (one USB 3.0 along with a USB 2.0 connector) and dual Gigabit Ethernet LAN ports. There are also two 80mm fans at the rear to keep the contents cool, and power input for a laptop-style PSU.

In our previous F2-200 review, we commented about the lack of locks on the drive bays, inviting their accidental unlatching. And that remains unchanged here, sadly.

In the packaging, along with the F4-420 is a box that contains the PSU, power cables, a single Ethernet cable, and a screwdriver to use with a selection of drive mounting screws.

It is possible to install 3.5 and 2.5-inch mechanisms, allowing for 2.5-inch SSDs along with conventional spinning platter-based storage. However, you can’t allocate an SSD as a cache for conventional drives, unfortunately.

Specifications

For those with four 12TB hard drives handy, there is the potential for 48TB of storage in the F4-420, but only if you’re willing to decline any form of resilience to drive failure. Using a RAID 5 configuration a whopping 36GB of usable space is available. Or 24TB if you decide to use a RAID 1 mirror instead.

On the TerraMaster specification page it proudly proclaims that instead of using an ARM CPU, the F4-420 has been blessed with a quad-core 2GHz Intel Celeron (J1900) along with 4GB of DDR3 memory.

Curiously that’s a lower processor clock than the F4-220, which sported a 2.4GHz Intel J1800. Also worth noting is the fact that the 4GB of RAM on this system can’t be user upgraded.

The critical difference is that the J1900 is a quad-core processor, whereas the J1800 is dual-core. And that’s the only significant difference between the F4-420 and it’s 30% cheaper F4-220 cousin.

Performance

File serving performance on this system is entirely dependent on having a managed switch with the functionality to create channel bonding. Without that critical functionality the best speed you’ll see, almost irrespective of the drives in use, are 115MB/s reading and 110MB/s writing.

That’s the effective limits of Gigabit Ethernet, not the NAS box.

With both Ethernet ports connected to a suitable switch, those scores can be doubled. But unless any connecting computers also have dual LAN networking, the extra performance will be aggregated across multiple users.

For those wanting to use both Ethernet ports simultaneously, you have some interesting options including load balancing over two switches, Dynamic Link Aggregation (802.3ad), Balance XOR and an automatic fail-over mode.

Wi-Fi isn’t an inherent capability, but you can insert a suitable USB Wi-Fi adapter into one of the available ports and establish a direct link through that.

Accessing the F4-420 as a file server elicits a suitably snappy response. Monitoring the performance logs while intentionally flooding the bandwidth of both LAN adapters shows that even the most intense transfers won’t overload the quad-core CPU.

In use

Getting the review unit operational wasn’t as slick and painless as it should have been. Many of the issues here revolved around the TNAS software that TerraMaster uses to initialize the device and then install its TOS 3.1 operating system.

While possibly a temporary glitch, the download speed of the TerraMaster website was disappointingly slow. It took over two hours to download the required files, disturbingly.

When we’d finally got it downloaded, the TNAS PC app didn’t include a proper installer, and just appeared to be a collection of VB code with an obsolete file manifest.

Our first attempt to run this software failed – mainly because it made assumptions about the .NET installation on the client PC that wasn’t guaranteed or even tested, causing it to crash.

I’m sure a skilled IT department would have no problems resolving the TNAS application issues, but they might easily frustrate a less capable user.


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