Terramaster NAS

ver01@ · 19 Apr 2026 at 10:43

Time to upgrade from the trusty DS218+ and decided to switch sides after Synology's shenanigans with disks and apps.
I am considering the Terramaster F2-425 - am I right to think that I can upgrade the RAM using a laptop DDR4 SODIMM as I have plenty lying around?

Snapshot · 20 Apr 2026 at 07:47

Yes, it has a single SODIMM socket. I have an F2-425 Plus and am very pleased with it. It's a good bit better than the F2-425 but uses DDR5 rather than DDR4.
TM staff are very active in the user forum which is much better than the big three Taiwanese brands manage. There's a public beta of TOS 7 in progress - much better than TOS 6.

An alternative could be the Asustor AS5402T - more expensive but has two SODIMM sockets and takes four NVMe drives as well as two HDDs.

ver01@ · 20 Apr 2026 at 09:27

I think the Plus will be an overkill (plus it is not black and I don't have any spare DDR5 SODIMMS

).
Having NVME slots is interesting - does this make a noticeable difference in how the TOS responds?

Snapshot · 20 Apr 2026 at 18:11

NVMe drives can be configured as storage or cache. I have all mine configured as storage, holding the stuff I'm likely to use day-to-day. All the backups, etc. go straight to HDD and the SSD data is mirrored to HDD overnight. This means my HDDs very rarely spin up and access is instant. There are only a couple of devices on my LAN that are still 1Gbps; most are at least 2.5Gbps so data transfers are pretty fast. I expect the OS responds better but it's four years since I last had a NAS OS on HDD.

ver01@ · 23 Apr 2026 at 06:41

Decided to go with the the F2-424 as for some reason it was even cheaper than the 425, has NVME slots, faster CPU, more memory, dual LAN ports. Strange marketing.

Snapshot · 25 Apr 2026 at 08:43

Yes, I'm trying to work out why the F4 SSD is the same price as the F2-425 Plus when it has fewer drive slots, worse CPU and only one 5GbE port.

ver01@ · 25 Apr 2026 at 08:56

It is much, much smaller to start with and the CPU is probably faster than the N150 of the 425 plus.

iamtheoneneo · 2026-05-13T09:54:55+0100

I purchased a F4-425 Plus this week to replace my N40L and I am very impressed. The main reason was being able to mount windows drives and after a little bit of Google to figure out where things were I set everything up with little issue.

Its crazy quiet on idle, has a very small footprint and iv halfed my idle TDP without doing anything (16W from the plug). The addition of 3 M2 slots is a nice way of bumping up the TBs without getting something bigger.
I was thinking about going the custom root (Jonsbro, N board etc) but given the price of RAM at the moment being able to get 16GB of RAM as stock ended up making it a no brainer really.