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The TerraMaster F4 SSD is a network-attached storage (NAS) device that supports up to 32 TB of solid state storage thanks to four M.2 2280 NVMe slots. It ships with 8 GB of user-replaceable DDR5 memory and has a decent set of ports that includes a 5 Gigabit LAN port, three USB 3.2 Gen 2 ports, and HDMI for video output.
TerraMaster's new 4-bay SSD NAS has a list price of $400, but it's available for $360 from Amazon or TerraMaster's online store at time of publication. That makes it relatively affordable for a NAS with those features. And it's half the price of the F8 SSD Plus that I reviewed last year, and $200 cheaper than the F8 SSD while offering many of the same features.
Like the F8 SSD, the F4 SSD uses an Intel N95 processor, which is a 15-watt, quad-core processor based on Intel Alder Lake-N architecture. It's faster than many of the chips that are used in consumer-grade off-the-shelf NAS systems, but it's not exactly a high-end chip and may limit your ability to use the F4 SSD for things like running multiple virtual machines at the same time.
TerraMaster did make a few changes for this lower-cost model. One is that the F4 SSD has a 5 Gigabit LAN port while the F8 SSD supports 10 Gigabit speeds. Another is that there's support for four M.2 2280 NVMe SSDs instead of eight.
But there's also some good news on the storage front because while all of the M.2 slots in the F8 SSD top out at PCIe 3.0 x1 speeds, two of the F4 SSD's M.2 slots support PCIe 3.0 x2 while the other two are PCIe 3.0 x1. This is likely because Intel Alder Lake-N processors only support 9 lanes of PCIe, so there was simply no way to offer 2-lanes of PCIe on a system with eight M.2 slots. By cutting the number of total SSDs supported in half, TerraMaster was able to improve the speed for a couple of those slots by adding support for 2-lanes of PCIe 3.0.
But while those higher speeds may be helpful for operations that run locally on the NAS, the slower 5 Gigabit LAN connection means you probably won't notice any difference in speed when accessing the SSDs over a network connection.
The F4 SSD also comes with TerraMaster's OS, currently TOS 6. This OS supports BTRFS and ext4 filesystems and is available in several European and Asian languages as well as English. Importantly for some users, you are not restricted to just running TOS 6 as the F4 SSD also allows you to install whatever OS you choose.
TerraMaster provided Liliputing with a F4 SSD for free, with no requirement that the NAS be returned upon completion of the review. This review is not sponsored by TerraMaster, and the company did not modify or approve the content of this article in any way.
Design
Aesthetically, the F4 SSD is an unassuming small black plastic box, measuring just 138 x 60 x 140 mm (5.43 x 2.36 x 5.51 inches) making it 38 mm (1½") shorter than the F8 SSD which is 177 mm (6.97 inches) tall.
The front and sides are plain as the ports are all configured on the rear of the device.
From top to bottom, the rear ports include:
At the very bottom is a silver thumb screw which when removed provides access to the internal M.2 NVMe slots and memory.
Each NVMe slot is numbered on the left. So in theory you can easily identify which NVMe maps to how the OS references it, but see my comment below when installing your own OS.
Also silk-printed on the motherboard for each NVMe slot is its hardware configuration expressed as either PCIe 3.0 x2 or x1.
The memory slot is on the other side of the motherboard next to the chunky heatsink covering the CPU.
Hidden in the corner is an undocumented USB port, shown here populated with a Sandisk Ultra Fit USB. The port is only a USB 2.0 (480 Mbps) port, and you can only use a very small USB drive with it as the space is extremely limited.
The NVMe side of the motherboard also includes another undocumented "drive" consisting of an MX30LF2G28AC-TI NAND memory chip soldered onto a little carrier board. This provides 2 Gbit or 250 MB of storage that can be accessed by the OS.
It is used by the TerraMaster TOS operating system as a boot drive but is fair game for anyone wanting to repurpose it with their own OS.
Cooling is based on the chimney effect. The base of the F4 SSD contains two air intake fans which suck cooler external air into the device and then blow it up through the device cooling the NVMe drives, memory and CPU heat sink.
This hot air is then expelled out of the device through the top.
To power the device, included in the box is an EDAC EA10682U-120 power adapter that provides up to 72 watts (12.0V/6.0A). This is certainly overkill as the F4 SSD consumes nothing like this amount of power so don't be immediately put off by this.
It also comes with a C7 "figure 8/infinity" power cable. I found that the cable running from the power adapter to the device was somewhat short, and it resulted in my adapter hanging in mid-air. This became annoying as I had to place the adapter next to the device. Although this was a result of my physical setup, it is not normally an issue which is why I've pointed it out.
TOS 6.0I started by testing TOS 6.0. It first checks that you've got at least one M.2 NVMe drive installed otherwise you cannot boot the F4 SSD.
You then have a choice of allowing TerraMaster to configure your TOS implementation using its own defaults, which of course is the recommended option for first-time users, or you can perform a custom installation of TOS.
I opted for the default setup. It first downloaded the bootloader and then erased the first two drives so it could configure partitions before installing TOS.
One of the benefits of using the TOS default installation settings, is that a novice Linux user is effectively shielded from having to configure the filesystem. The actual configuration implemented by TOS is a mixture of using mdadm to configure RAID devices and LVM to create logical volumes.
Immediately after rebooting you must accept an End User License Agreement (EULA) which includes that the agreement is bound by the laws of the People's Republic of China.
In case anyone is confused, the People's Republic of China (PRC) and the Republic of China (ROC) are very different. Whilst the ROC is Taiwan, the PRC is mainland China so if you are concerned, you should take the time to read the EULA and make yourself aware of what you are agreeing to. Fortunately you can also install an alternate operating system if you're uncomfortable using the one that comes pre-installed. See below for more details.
After that, you first set the name for the device and the "effectively root" username and password (as 'root' has been disabled) together with an email which will get the notifications from the NAS.
A "Security Advisor" application is then run automatically to bring risks to your attention that need (optionally) addressing.
The TOS desktop has two main options that most users will focus on. Normal usage will be through applications that are obviously installed on TOS.
New applications can be easily installed from the "App Center".
And then there is management and maintenance of the NAS which is through the "Control Panel".
I tried setting up Jellyfin and found it to be very simple using the TOS application. I also looked at the load created by playing music, and found that it was minimal on the system.
Equally, setting up an Ubuntu container was also straightforward through the Docker application menus.
One area I looked at more closely was the use of AI in image recognition. I was interested in seeing whether the AI was really local or if it required the internet and therefore opened a risk that my photos may somehow leave my NAS into the yonder ethernet.
Having installed the "photos" application, I disabled the F4 SSD's access to the internet by blocking it at my network router.
I then copied over some generic free pictures of cats and dogs, making sure I had a couple of duplicates.
I then set the AI recognition settings to identify both Characters and Scenes. The results were correct in that I had ten pictures of dogs and eleven pictures of cats with the other classifications of Other, Grassland and Joyful being slightly more dubious.
I then added some AI generated images of people, again with a couple of duplicates. For some reason, some pictures didn't display properly.
Having added the images, I found that it didn't recognise all the "people".
On clearing and then re-running the AI recognition, it got better.
I also tried running the deduplication application however despite it saying it had deduplicated files and saved space, the results were unchanged.
I'm not sure whether using AI to deduplicate AI duplicates has resulted in duplicating AI or there was an error in the application. But the important point was that AI recognition ran without access to the internet. I suppose there is still a lingering doubt as to whether it "worked" without the internet due to the results. However, I feel that was more a consequence of the data and the applications rather than any darker reasons.
Accessing the NAS over a local network using the Ethernet port worked without issue. Both upload and download saw a consistent 4.71 Gbps.
Read and write speeds accessing the NAS over a local network were also as expected. I measured a sequential read speed of just under 585 MB/s for a 1 GiB file and 478 MB/s for a sequential write speed.
Overall, TOS is maturing into a stable NAS OS. However, there are a couple of omissions. Currently there is no bare-metal VM capability and only VirtualBox is supported. Additionally, TOS does not support ZFS as a filesystem which may disappoint some users.
If these missing features are a deal breaker, then you can always install your own OS.
Other Operating SystemsI was able to install Ubuntu desktop without issue although it probably isn't the best OS for use as a NAS.
So, I also tested installing Debian standard. Here I encountered a major issue as the Debian installer doesn't include an Ethernet driver for the Realtek RTL8126 5 GbE port and the F4 SSD doesn't have a WiFi card to use instead.
To work around this, I had to use a USB Ethernet adapter. And once Debian was installed, I used the r8168-dkms package to get the Ethernet port working.
It is relatively straightforward, albeit a bit tedious, for a reasonably experienced Linux user to create a similar filesystem structure as the default TOS filesystem but using ZFS instead of BTRFS. I've simplified it slightly by not swapping across a RAID drive.
However, if you look at the drive numbers and the lanes allocated to each drive, you will see that for the first drive (i.e. nvme0n1) it actually maps to PCI device 02:00.0 which only has one lane allocated to it. I had assumed that the NVME_1 stencilled on the motherboard would map to nvme0n1 and not nvme3n1 which is what it does. Therefore, my filesystem is configured the wrong way around compared to how TOS configured it.
As a result, the drive speed I measured when testing using my "ldiskmark" wrapper of "fio" for the root filesystem, was of a RAID1 device consisting of two ext4 drives which only a single lane of PCIe 3.0 allocated to each.
The sequential read speed was measured as 890.4 MB/s and the sequential write speed was measured as 863.6 MB/s. The sequential read speed of /Volume1 was 1397.2 MB/s with a sequential write speed of only 410.4 MB/s for this RAID5 ZFS drive.
I then went on to create a Jellyfin container and an Ubuntu VM using KVM and I also installed Cockpit to remotely manage the NAS.
Interestingly, the sequential read speed within the VM was measured as 2005.4 MB/s and sequential write speed was 1291.4 MB/s.
The other difference I saw compared to TOS was for the read and write speeds to this Debian NAS over the local network. I still got a sequential read speed of just under 585 MB/s for a 1 GiB file, but now I got an improved 575.83 MB/s for a sequential write speed.
Finally, I tested running Unraid from the USB 2.0 port within the device. Although I didn't spend much time testing it, everything seemed to be recognised and working fine.
Power Consumption and NoiseThe F4 SSD doesn't use much power. When I installed and configured Debian, I measured power consumption after booting at 10.3 watts. When running a Jellyfin container power consumption rose slightly to 10.4 watts. Only when I was running a Jellyfin container, Ubuntu in a VM, together with Portainer and Cockpit, did I see the power consumption increase to 10.6 watts.
All this time the F4 SSD ran silently. When I say silently, what I mean is my sound meter couldn't pick up any noise from the fans so they were making less than 30 dBA. Drive temperatures were constantly good and the maximum I saw was only 50 °C when they were being heavily used.
VerdictThe F4 SSD is a NAS that comes with a storage focused OS, support for up to four NVMe drives, an energy-efficient processor and an effective cooling system. And it's competitively priced, selling for $400 or less.
While its energy-efficient Intel N95 processor won't drive up your electric bill or generate a lot of heat, the down side is that it's not a very powerful processor – you can't expect to run multiple VMs or more demanding applications on the F4 SSD.
Network connectivity should be fine for home users, as the absence of a 10 GbE port is really not that significant given it still has a 5 GbE port which is sufficient for the speed of the storage.
The small footprint from its vertical orientation also makes the F4 SSD potentially suitable as a travel NAS.
Overall, the quality is good, and the F4 SSD is well-made and offers plenty of flexibility.
Thank you to TerraMaster for providing us with a demo unit to test for this review.
It is available for $360 from Amazon or TerraMaster's online store at time of publication.
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