Designed for use as a home multimedia hub and data repository, the TerraMaster F2-425 Plus is a two-bay NAS with a boatload of ports to offer: a pair of high-speed 5GbE LAN connections, four USBs, and an HDMI. It also has three M.2 SSD slots for use as fast caching or primary storage. (It's up to you.) The F2-425 Plus is a solid performer, and its $499.99 list price is in line with similarly configured, muscular two-bay NAS systems. That said, for a lower list price, you can get our top pick for two-bay NAS devices, the $469.99 Asustor Lockerstor 2 Gen2+ (AS6702T v2), which offers slightly better performance, four M.2 SSD slots, and a much larger app catalog. The last factor is the big tipping point in the Asustor's favor. If you find it marked down, though, don't sleep on the F2-245 Plus; if it has the apps you want, it's still a formidable NAS.

Design and Features: Two Bays, But Big-Iron Ambitions

The F2-425 Plus comes sheathed in a black-and-silver enclosure that measures 6.0 by 4.9 by 8.9 inches (HWD). Up front, I spotted two tool-free drive bays, a power button, a Type-A USB 3.2 port, two drive-activity indicator LEDs, and a power LED. The two bays accommodate 2.5-inch or 3.5-inch hot-swappable drives, but the unit doesn't include any drives in the box. (That's the case nowadays with nearly every multi-bay NAS that we review.)

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

Around back, I spotted a pair of 5GbE LAN ports, two additional Type-A USB ports, a USB-C port, an HDMI port, and a power jack. All of those USB ports support 10Gbps throughput.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

Under the hood, you get three M.2 Type-2280 NVMe slots and an 80mm cooling fan, as well as a powerhouse Intel N150 ("Twin Lake") quad-core CPU with a maximum burst frequency of 3.6GHz. That's paired with a generous 8GB of DDR5 RAM. (I noticed that the memory is expandable to 32GB, via laptop-style SO-DIMMs.)

The M.2 SSDs can act as simple storage, or be configured in RAID 5 for faster drive performance and redundancy. TerraMaster also notes that it's possible to chain in its own direct-attach storage (DAS) units via USB to expand the overall drive capacity.

As is, the system supports 8K video decoding (H.265) and can house up to 84TB of storage when fully populated with two 30TB 3.5-inch drives and three 8TB M.2 SSD modules. Supported RAID configurations include TRAID and TRAID+ (TerraMaster’s hybrid RAID), Single, JBOD, RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID5, RAID 6, and RAID 10. The system will work with drives formatted in the Btrfs and EXT4 file systems.

Software: A Quick Look at TOS and the App Center

The F2-425 Plus, which uses TerraMaster’s TOS operating system, can be managed using a web-based console or the TNAS mobile app. I opened the web console and saw a Windows-like desktop with icons positioned just below the address bar. Clicking the Start icon opened a specific application, and tapping the File Manager let me create, share, and search for files and folders, as well as upload and download them.

(Credit: Terramaster)

A Backup icon lets you use TerraMaster’s Business Backup Suite to copy and restore data—you can create Time Machine, CloudSync, and Duple backup sets—and set backup schedules. When I tapped the Control Panel icon, I summoned a screen for setting user privileges, configuring network settings, creating storage pools and volumes, accessing general system settings, and viewing system information. The last item tracked parameters such as CPU usage, port assignments, and the users online.

Experimenting with the App Center icon allowed me to download productivity, media-server, cloud-server, backup-and-restore, and office-related applications. When I wrote this, I found 57 apps available for download—which pales in comparison to the Asustor AS6702T V2 and its 256 apps.

(Credit: Terramaster)

Finally, the Docker icon lets you download and configure Docker Compose and Portainer, for running customized containerized applications.

Installation and Setup: Easy Going, Just Be Patient

Installing and configuring the F2-425 Plus was relatively simple; I tested solely with platter drives.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

I popped in a pair of 10TB Seagate IronWolf drives, downloaded the TNAS utility, and connected the NAS to a 2.5GbE switch that was also linked to my desktop PC and router. When I ran the TNAS utility on the desktop, it automatically searched for and found the NAS.

From there, I tapped Start and selected Default as my initialization method, which creates a storage pool and configures the drives for TRIAD RAID, resulting in a total of 9.09TB of storage capacity. (You can also choose Custom to manually configure your storage pool and RAID options.) After 12 hours of initialization and synchronization time, the NAS was ready for testing.

Performance Testing: Competitive Transfer Speeds

The F2-425 Plus turned in respectable scores in our file-transfer tests, in which I use a 4.9GB folder containing a mix of music, video, photo, and office documents to measure NAS read and write performance.

The unit tallied 245MBps on the write test—identical to the Asustor AS6702T v2 and the Ugreen DXP2800, and a bit faster than the QNAP TS-216G. The F2-425 Plus' total of 188MBps on the read test matched the Ugreen DXP2800 but couldn’t keep pace with the QNAP TS-216G (196MBps) or the Asustor AS6702T v2 (245MBps).